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THE  CRITIC  AND  THE  DRAMA 


THE  BOOKS  OF  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 

The  Theatre 
co:medians  all 
the  popular  theatre 
mr.  george  jean  nathan  presents 
another  book  on  the  theatre 
the  theatre,  the  drama,  the  girls 
the  critic  and  the  drama 

Satire 

A    BOOK    WITHOUT    A    TITLE 
BOTTOMS    UP 

Plays 

THE    ETERNAL    MYSTERY 

HELioGABALUs   (ill  collaboration  with  H.L.Mencken) 
Philosophy 

THE      AMERICAN      CREDO:       A      CONTRIBUTION         TOWARD 
THE     INTERPRETATION     OF     THE      NATIONAL     MIND 

(in  collaboration  with  II.  L.  Mencken) 

Travel  and  Reminiscence 
EUROPE  AFTER  8:15    (tTi    Collaboration    tcith    H.    L. 
Mencken) 


THE  •  CRITIC  •  AND 
THE  '  DRAMA 

BY     GEORGE     JEAN     NATHAN 


New  York        ALFRED  •  A  •  KNOPF  Mcmxxii 


COPYRIGHT,  1922,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  Inc. 

Fuhlished  January,  1922 


Set  up  and  printed  by  the  Vail-Ballou  Co.,  Binghamion,  N.  Y. 

Paper  ( IVanen' s)  furni slu'd  by  Henry  Lindenmeyr  dt  ^ons,  Neiv  York,  N.  Y. 

Bound  by  tlte  H.  Wolff  instate,  New  York,  N.  Y. 


MANUFACTURED   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES   OF   AMERICA 


WITH  HIS  PERMISSION 

TO  EDWARD  GORDON  CRAIG 

THE  FIRST  iESTHETICIAN  OF  THE  THEATRE 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

I.     Aesthetic  Jurisprudence  S 

II.     Drama  as  an  Art  29 

III.     The  Place  of  the  Theatre  63 

IV.     The  Place  of  Acting  83 

V.     Dramatic   Criticism  113 

VI.     Dramatic  Criticism  in  America  133 


Of  all  the  arts  and  half-arts — perhaps 
even  above  that  of  acting — is  the  art  of 
criticism  fxmnded,  most  greatly  upon 
vanity.  All  criticism  is,  at  bottom,  an 
effort  on  the  part  of  its  practitioner  to 
show  off  himself  and  his  art  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  artist  and  the  art  which  he 
criticizes.  The  heavy  modesty  practised 
by  certain  critics  is  but  a  recognition  of, 
and  self-conscious  attempt  to  diminish, 
the  fundamental  and  ineradicable  vain- 
glory of  criticism.  The  great  critics  are 
those  who,  recognizing  the  intrinsic,  per- 
manent and  indeclinable  egotism  of  the 
critical  art,  make  no  senseless  effort  to 
conceal  it.  The  absurd  critics  are  those 
who  attempt  to  conceal  it  and,  in  the 
attempt,  make  their  art  and  themselves 
doubly  absurd. 


I.     AESTHETIC  JURISPRUDENCE 


I.     AESTHETIC  JURISPRUDENCE 


ART  is  a  reaching  out  into  the  ugliness 
of  the  world  for  vagrant  beauty  and 
the  imprisoning  of  it  in  a  tangible 
dream.  Criticism  is  the  dream  book.  All  art 
is  a  kind  of  subconscious  madness  expressed  in 
terms  of  sanity;  criticism  is  essential  to  the 
interpretation  of  its  mysteries,  for  about 
everything  truly  beautiful  there  is  ever  some- 
thing mysterious  and  disconcerting.  Beauty 
is  not  always  immediately  recognizable  as 
beauty;  what  often  passes  for  beauty  is  mere 
infatuation;  living  beauty  is  like  a  love  that 
has  outlasted  the  middle-years  of  life,  and  has 
met  triumphantly  the  test  of  time,  and  faith, 
and  cynic  meditation.  For  beauty  is  a  sleep- 
walker in  the  endless  corridors  of  the  wakeful 
world,  uncertain,  groping,  and  not  a  little 
strange.  And  criticism  is  its  tender  guide- 
Art  is  a  partnership  between  the  artist  and 
[3] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
the  artist-critic.  The  former  creates;  the 
latter  re-creates.  Without  criticism,  art 
would  of  course  still  be  art,  and  so  with  its 
windows  walled  in  and  with  its  lights  extin- 
guished would  the  Louvre  still  be  the  Louvre. 
Criticism  is  the  windows  and  chandeliers  of 
art:  it  illuminates  the  enveloping  darkness  in 
which  art  might  otherwise  rest  only  vaguely 
discernible,  and  perhaps  altogether  unseen. 

Criticism,  at  its  best,  is  a  great,  tall  candle 
on  the  altar  of  art ;  at  its  worst,  which  is  to  say 
in  its  general  run,  a  campaign  torch  flaring  red 
in  behalf  of  aesthetic  ward-heelers.  This  cam- 
paign torch  motif  in  criticism,  with  its 
drunken  enthusiasm  and  raucous  hollering 
born  of  ignorance,  together  with  what  may  be 
called  the  Prince  Albert  motif,  with  its  sober, 
statue-like  reserve  born  of  ignorance  that,  be- 
ing well-mannered,  is  not  so  bumptious  as  the 
other,  has  contributed  largely  to  the  common 
estimate  of  criticism  as  a  profession  but 
slightly  more  exalted  than  Second  Avenue 
auctioneering  if  somewhat  less  than  Fifth. 
Yet    criticism    is    itself    an    art.     It    might, 

[4] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
indeed,  be  well  defined  as  an  art  within  an  art, 
jince  every  work  of  art  is  the  result  of  a  strug- 
gle between  the  heart  that  is  the  artist  himself 
and  his  mind  that  is  the  critic.  Once  his  work 
is  done,  the  artist's  mind,  tired  from  the  bitter- 
ness of  the  struggle,  takes  the  form  of  a  second 
artist,  puts  on  this  second  artist's  strange  hat, 
coat  and  checkered  trousers,  and  goes  forth 
with  refreshed  vigour  to  gossip  abroad  how 
much  of  the  first  artist's  work  was  the  result 
of  its  original  splendid  vitality  and  how  much 
the  result  of  its  gradually  diminished  vitaHty 
and  sad  weariness.  The  wrangling  that 
occurs  at  times  between  art  and  criticism  is, 
at  bottom,  merely  a  fraternal  discord,  one  in 
which  Cain  and  Abel  belabour  each  other  with 
stuffed  clubs.  Criticism  is  often  most  sym- 
pathetic when  it  is  apparently  most  cruel:  the 
propounder  of  the  sternest,  hardest  philosophy 
that  the  civilized  world  has  known  never  failed 
sentimentally  to  kiss  and  embrace  his  sister, 
Therese  Elisabeth  Alexandra  Nietzsche,  every 
night  at  bed-time.  "It  is  not  possible,"  Cabell 
has  written,  "to  draw  inspiration  from  a  worn- 

[5] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
an's  beauty  unless  you  comprehend  how  easy 
it  would  be  to  mui'der  her."  And — "Only 
those  who  have  firmness  may  be  really  tender- 
hearted," said  Rochefoucauld.  One  may 
sometimes  even  throw  mud  to  tonic  purpose. 
Consider  Karlsbad. 

Art  is  the  haven  wherein  the  disillusioned 
may  find  illusion.  Truth  is  no  part  of  art. 
Nor  is  the  mission  of  art  simple  beauty,  as  the 
text  books  tell  us.  The  mission  of  art  is  the 
magnification  of  simple  beauty  to  proportions 
so  heroic  as  to  be  almost  overpowering.  Art 
is  a  gross  exaggeration  of  natural  beauty: 
there  was  never  a  woman  so  beautiful  as  the 
Venus  di  Milo,  or  a  man  so  beautiful  as  the 
Apollo  Belvedere  of  the  Vatican,  or  a  sky  so 
beautiful  as  Monet's,  or  human  speech  so  beau- 
tiful as  Shakespeare's,  or  the  song  of  a  night- 
ingale so  beautiful  as  Ludwig  van  Beethoven's. 
But  as  art  is  a  process  of  magnification,  so 
criticism  is  a  process  of  reduction.  Its  pur- 
pose is  the  reducing  of  the  magnifications  of 
art  to  the  basic  classic  and  aesthetic  principles, 
and  the  subsequent  announcement  thereof  in 

[6] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
terms  proportioned  to  the  artist's  interplay  of 
fundamental  skill  and  overtopping  imagina- 
tion. 

The  most  general  fault  of  criticism  lies  in  a 
confusion  of  its  own  internal  processes  with 
those  of  art :  it  is  in  the  habit  of  regarding  the 
business  of  art  as  a  reduction  of  life  to  its 
essence  of  beauty,  and  the  business  of  crit- 
icism as  an  expansion  of  that  essence  to  its 
fullest  flow.  The  opposite  is  more  reasonable. 
Art  is  a  beautiful,  swollen  lie ;  criticism,  a  cold 
compress.  The  concern  of  art  is  with  beauty ; 
the  concern  of  criticism  is  with  truth.  And 
truth  and  beauty,  despite  the  Sunday  School, 
are  often  strangers.  This  confusion  of  the 
business  of  art  and  that  of  criticism  has  given 
birth  to  the  so-called  "contagious,"  or  inspira- 
tional, criticism,  than  which  nothing  is  more 
mongrel  and  absurd.  Criticism  is  designed  to 
state  facts — charmingly,  gracefully,  if  possible 
— but  still  facts.  It  is  not  designed  to  exhort, 
enlist,  convert.  This  is  the  business  not  of 
the  critic,  but  of  those  readers  of  the  critic 
whom  the  facts  succeed  in  convincing  and  gal- 

[7] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
vanizing.     Contagious^  criticism   is  merely   a 
vainglorious  critic's  essay  at  popularity:  facts 
heated  up  to  a  degree  where  they  melt  into 
caressing  nothingness. 

But  if  this  "criticism  with  a  glow"  is  not  to 
be  given  countenance,  even  less  is  to  be  suf- 
fered the  criticism  that,  in  its  effort  at  a  fastid- 
ious and  elegant  reserve,  leans  so  far  backward 
that  it  freezes  its  ears.  This  species  of  crit- 
icism fails  not  only  to  enkindle  the  reader,  but 
fails  also — and  this  is  more  important — to  en- 
kindle the  critic  himself.  The  ideal  critic  is 
perhaps  much  like  a  Thermos  bottle:  full  of 
warmth,  he  suggests  the  presence  of  the  heat 
within  him  without  radiating  it.  This  inner 
warmth  is  essential  to  a  critic.  But  this  inner 
warmth,  where  it  exists,  is  automatically 
chilled  and  banished  from  a  critic  by  a 
protracted  indulgence  in  excessive  critical 
reserve.  Just  as  the  professional  frown 
assumed  by  a  much  photographed  public  mag- 
nifico  often  becomes  stubbornly  fixed  upon  his 
hitherto  gentle  brow,  so  does  the  prolonged 
spurious  constraint  of  a  critic  in  due  time 

[8] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
psychologically  hoist  hiin  on  his  own  petard. 
A  writer's  work  does  not  grow  more  and  more 
like  him;  a  writer  grows  more  and  more  like 
his  work.  The  best  writing  that  a  man  pro- 
duces is  always  just  a  httle  superior  to  himself. 
There  never  was  a  literary  artist  who  did  not 
appreciate  the  difficulty  of  keejjing  up  to  the 
pace  of  his  writings.  A  writer  is  dominated 
by  the  standard  of  his  own  writings;  he  is  a 
slave  in  transitu,  lashed,  tormented,  and  miser- 
able. The  weak  and  inferior  literary  artist, 
such  a  critic  as  the  one  alluded  to,  soon 
becomes  the  helpless  victim  of  his  own  writ- 
ings: like  a  vampire  of  his  own  creation  thsy 
turn  uj)on  him  and  suck  from  him  the  warm 
blood  that  was  erstwhile  his.  A  pose  in  time 
becomes  natural:  a  man  with  a  good  left  eye 
cannot  affect  a  monocle  for  years  without 
eventually  coming  to  need  it.  A  critic  cannot 
write  ice  without  becoming  in  time  himself 
at  least  partly  frosted. 

Paraphrasing  Pascal,  to  little  minds  all 
things  are  gi-eat.  Great  art  is  in  constant 
conflict  with  the  awe  of  little  minds.     Art  is 

[9] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
something  like  a  wonderful  trapeze  performer 
swinging  high  above  the  heads  of  the  bewil- 
dered multitude  and  nervous  lest  it  be  made 
to  lose  its  balance  and  to  slip  by  the  periodic 
sudden  loud  marvellings  of  the  folks  below. 
The  little  mind  and  its  little  criticism  are  the 
flattering  foes  of  sound  art.  Such  art 
demands  for  its  training  and  triumph  the 
countless  preliminary  body  blows  of  muscular 
criticism  guided  by  a  muscular  mind.  Art 
and  the  artist  cannot  be  developed  by  mere 
back-slapping.  If  art,  according  to  Beule,  is 
the  intervention  of  the  human  mind  in  the 
elements  furnished  by  experience,  criticism  is 
the  intervention  of  the  human  mind  in  the 
elements  furnished  by  aesthetic  passion.  Art 
and  the  artist  are  ever  youthful  lovers;  crit- 
icism is  their  chaperon. 


II 


I    do   not   believe    finally    in   this    or   that 
"theory"    of   criticism.     There   are   as   many 
sound  and  apt  species  of  criticism  as  there 
[10] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
are  works  to  be  criticized.  To  say  that  art 
must  be  criticized  only  after  this  formula  or 
after  that,  is  to  say  that  art  must  be  contrived 
only  out  of  this  formula  or  out  of  that.  As 
every  work  of  art  is  an  entity,  a  thing  in  itself, 
so  is  every  piece  of  criticism  an  entity,  a  thing 
in  itself.  That  "Thus  Spake  Zarathustra" 
must  inevitably  be  criticized  by  the  canons  of 
the  identical  "theory"  with  which  one  criticizes 
"Tristan  and  Isolde"  is  surely  difficult  of 
reasoning. 

To  the  Goethe-Carlyle  doctrine  that  the 
critic's  duty  lies  alone  in  discerning  the  artist's 
aim,  his  point  of  view  and,  finally,  his  execu- 
tion of  the  task  before  him,  it  is  easy  enough 
to  subscribe,  but  certainly  this  is  not  a  "theory" 
of  criticism  so  much  as  it  is  a  foundation  for 
a  theory.  To  advance  it  as  a  theory,  full- 
grown,  full-fledged  and  flapping,  as  it  has  been 
advanced  by  the  Italian  Croce  and  his  admir- 
ers, is  to  publish  the  preface  to  a  book  without 
the  book  itself.  Accepted  as  a  theory  complete 
in  itself,  it  fails  by  virtue  of  its  several  un- 
developed   intrinsic    problems,    chief    among 

[11] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
which  is  its  neglect  to  consider  the  undeniable 
fact  that,  though  each  work  of  art  is  indubi- 
tably an  entity  and  so  to  be  considered,  there 
is  yet  in  creative  art  what  may  be  termed  an 
aesthetic  genealogy  that  bears  heavily  upon 
comprehensive  criticism  and  that  renders  the 
artist's  aim,  his  point  of  view  and  his  execu- 
tion of  the  task  before  him  susceptible  to  a 
criticism  predicated  in  a  measure  upon  the 
work  of  the  sound  artist  who  has  just  preceded 
him. 

The  Goethe- Car lyle  hypothesis  is  a  little  too 
liberal.  It  calls  for  qualifications.  It  gives 
the  artist  too  much  ground,  and  the  critic  too 
little.  To  discern  the  artist's  aim,  to  discern 
the  artist's  point  of  view,  are  phrases  that 
require  an  amount  of  plumbing,  and  not  a 
few  foot-notes.  It  is  entirely  possible,  for 
example,  that  the  immediate  point  of  view  of 
an  artist  be  faulty,  yet  the  execution  of  his 
immediate  task  exceedingly  fine.  If  carefully 
planned  triumph  in  art  is  an  entity,  so  also 
may  be  undesigned  triumph.  I  do  not  say 
that  any  such  latter  phenomenon  is  usual,  but 
[12] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
it  is  conceivable,  and  hence  may  be  employed 
as  a  test  of  the  critical  hypothesis  in  point. 
Unschooled,  without  aim  or  point  of  view  in 
the  sense  of  this  hypothesis,  Schumann's  com- 
positions at  the  age  of  eleven  for  chorus  and 
orchestra  offer  the  quasi-theory  some  resist- 
ance. The  question  of  the  comparative  merit 
of  these  compositions  and  the  artist's  sub- 
sequent work  may  not  strictly  be  brought  into 
the  argument,  since  the  point  at  issue  is  merely 
a  theory  and  since  theory  is  properly  to  be 
tested  by  theory. 

Intent  and  achievement  are  not  necessarily 
twins.  I  have  always  perversely  thought  it 
likely  that  there  is  often  a  greater  degi'ce  of 
accident  in  fine  art  than  one  is  permitted  to 
believe.  The  aim  and  point  of  view  of  a 
bad  artist  are  often  admirable;  the  execution 
of  a  fine  artist  may  sometimes  be  founded  upon 
a  point  of  view  that  is,  from  an  apparently 
sound  critical  estimate,  at  striking  odds  with 
it.  One  of  the  finest  performances  in  all  mod- 
ern dramatic  writing,  upon  its  critical  recep- 
tion as  such,  came  as  a  great  surprise  to  the 
[13] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
writer  who  almost  unwittingly  had  achieved 
it.  Art  is  often  unconscious  of  itself.  Shake- 
speare, writing  popular  plays  to  order,  wrote 
the  greatest  plays  that  di'amatic  art  has 
known.  Mark  Twain,  in  a  disgusted  moment, 
threw  off  a  practical  joke,  and  it  turned  out  to 
be  literature. 

A  strict  adherence  to  the  principles  enun- 
ciated in  the  Goethe -Carlyle  theory  would 
result  in  a  confinement  of  art  for  all  the  the- 
ory's bold  aim  in  exactly  the  opposite  direc- 
tion. For  all  the  critic  may  accurately  say, 
the  aim  and  point  of  view  of,  say,  Richard 
Strauss  in  "Don  Quixote"  and  "A  Hero's 
Life,"  may  be  imperfect,  yet  the  one  critical 
fact  persists  that  the  executions  are  remark- 
ably fine.  All  things  considered,  it  were  per- 
haps better  that  the  critical  theory  under 
discussion,  if  it  be  accepted  at  all,  be  turned 
end  foremost:  that  the  artist's  execution  of 
the  task  before  him  be  considered  either  apart 
from  his  aim  and  point  of  view,  or  that  it  be 
considered  first,  and  then — with  not  too  much 
insistence  upon  them — his  point  of  view  and 

[14] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
his  aim.  This  would  seem  to  be  a  more  logical 
aesthetic  and  critical  order.  Tolstoi,  with  a 
sound,  inteUigent  and  technically  perfect  aim 
and  point  of  view  composed  second-rate 
drama.  So,  too,  Maeterlinck.  Synge,  by  his 
own  admissions  adjudged  critically  and  dra- 
matically guilty  on  both  counts,  composed  one 
of  the  truly  first-rate  dramas  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  stage. 

In  its  very  effort  to  avoid  pigeon-holing, 
the  Goethe- Car lyle  theory  pigeon-holes  itself. 
In  its  commendable  essay  at  catholicity,  it  is 
like  a  garter  so  elastic  that  it  fails  to  hold  itself 
up.  That  there  may  not  be  contradictions  in 
the  contentions  here  set  forth,  I  am  not  sure. 
But  I  advance  no  fixed,  definite  theory  of  my 
own;  I  advance  merely  contradictions  of  cer- 
tain of  the  phases  of  the  theories  held  by 
others,  and  contradictions  are  ever  in  the  habit 
of  begetting  contradictions.  Yet  such  con- 
tradictions are  in  themselves  apposite  and 
soundly  critical,  since  any  theory  susceptible 
of  contradictions  must  itself  be  contradictory 
and  insecure.  If  I  suggest  any  theory  on  my 
[15] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
part  it  is  a  variable  one:  a  theory  that,  in  this 
instance,  is  one  thing  and  in  that,  another. 
Criticism,  as  I  see  it — and  I  share  the  common 
opinion — is  simply  a  sensitive,  experienced  and 
thoroughbred  artist's  effort  to  interpret,  in 
terms  of  aesthetic  doctrine  and  his  own  pecul- 
iar soul,  the  work  of  another  artist  reciprocally 
to  that  artist  and  thus,  as  with  a  reflecting 
mirror,  to  his  public.  But  to  state  merely 
what  criticism  is,  is  not  to  state  the  doctrine 
of  its  application.  And  herein,  as  I  see  it,  is 
where  the  theorists  fail  to  cover  full  gi'ound. 
The  anatomy  of  criticism  is  composed  not  of 
one  theory,  but  of  a  theory — more  or  less  gen- 
erally agreed  upon — upon  which  are  reared  in 
turn  other  theories  that  are  not  so  generally 
agreed  upon.  The  Goethe-Carlyle  theoiy  is 
thus  like  a  three-story  building  on  which  the 
constructor  has  left  off  work  after  finishing 
only  the  first  story.  What  certain  aspects  of 
these  other  stories  may  be  like,  I  have  already 
tried  to  suggest. 

I  have  said  that,  if  I  have  any  theory  of  my 
own,  it  is  a  theory  susceptible  in  practice  of 

[16] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
numerous  surface  changes.  These  surface 
changes  often  distui'b  in  a  measure  this  or  that 
phase  of  what  lies  at  the  bottom.  Thus, 
speaking  as  a  critic  of  the  theatre,  I  find  it 
impossible  to  reconcile  myself  to  criticizing 
acting  and  drama  from  the  vantage  point  of 
the  same  theory,  say,  for  example,  the  Goethe- 
Carlyle  theory.  This  theory  fits  criticism  of 
drama  much  better  than  it  fits  criticism  of  act- 
ing, just  as  it  fits  criticism  of  painting  and 
sculpture  much  more  snugly  than  criticism  of 
music.  The  means  whereby  the  emotions  are 
directly  affected,  and  soundly  affected,  may 
at  times  be  critically  meretricious,  yet  the 
accomplishment  itself  may  be,  paradoxically, 
artistic.  Perhaps  the  finest  acting  perform- 
ance of  our  generation  is  Bernhardt's  Camille: 
its  final  effect  is  tremendous:  yet  the  means 
whereby  it  is  contrived  are  obviously  inartistic. 
Again,  "King  Lear,"  searched  into  with  crit- 
ical chill,  is  artistically  a  poor  instance  of  play- 
making,  yet  its  effect  is  precisely  the  effect 
striven  for.  Surely,  in  cases  like  these,  crit- 
icism founded  strictly  upon  an  inflexible  the- 

[17] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
ory  is  futile  criticism,  and  not  only  futile  but 
eminently  unfair. 

Here,  of  course,  I  exhibit  still  more  con- 
tradictions, but  through  contradictions  we  may 
conceivably  gain  more  secure  ground.  When 
his  book  is  once  opened,  the  author's  mouth  is 
shut.  (Wilde,  I  believe,  said  that;  and  though 
for  some  peculiar  reason  it  is  today  regarded 
as  suicidal  to  quote  the  often  profound  Wilde 
in  any  serious  argument,  I  risk  the  danger.) 
But  when  a  di'amatist's  play  or  a  composer's 
symphony  is  opened,  the  author  has  only 
begun  to  open  his  mouth.  What  results,  an 
emotional  art  within  an  intellectual  art,  calls 
for  a  critical  theory  within  a  critical  theory. 
To  this  composite  end,  I  oflper  a  suggestion: 
blend  with  the  Goethe-Carlyle  theory  that  of 
the  aforementioned  Wilde,  to  wit,  that  beauty 
is  uncriticizable,  since  it  has  as  many  meanings 
as  man  has  moods,  since  it  is  the  symbol  of 
symbols,  and  since  it  reveals  everything 
because  it  expresses  nothing.  The  trouble 
with  criticism — again  to  pose  a  contradiction — 
is  that,  in  certain  instances,  it  is  often  too  cer- 

[18] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
ebral.  Feeling  a  great  thrill  of  beauty,  it 
turns  to  its  somewhat  puzzled  mind  and  is 
apprised  that  the  thrill  which  it  has  unques- 
tionably enjoyed  from  the  work  of  art  might 
conceivably  be  of  pathological  origin,  a  frem- 
itus or  vibration  felt  upon  percussion  of  a 
hydatoid  tumour. 

The  Goethe-Carlyle  theory,  properly  rigid 
and  unyielding  so  far  as  emotional  groundlings 
are  concerned,  may,  I  believe,  at  times  safely 
be  chucked  under  the  chin  and  offered  a  com- 
munication of  gipsy  ardour  by  the  critic  whose 
emotions  are  the  residuum  of  trial,  test  and 
experience. 


Ill 


Coquelin  put  it  that  the  foothghts  exag- 
gerate everything:  they  modify  the  laws  of 
space  and  of  time;  they  put  miles  in  a  few 
square  feet;  they  make  minutes  appear  to  be 
hours.  Of  this  exaggeration,  dramatic  criti- 
cism— which  is  the  branch  of  criticism  of  which 
I  treat  in  particular — has  caught  something. 
[19] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Of  all  the  branches  of  criticism  it  is  intrinsi- 
cally the  least  sober  and  the  least  accurately 
balanced.  It  always  reminds  me  somehow  of 
the  lash  in  the  hands  of  ffiacus,  in  "The 
Frogs,"  falling  upon  Bacchus  and  Xanthus 
to  discover  which  of  the  two  is  the  divine,  the 
latter  meantime  endeavouring  to  conceal  the 
pain  that  would  betray  their  mortality  by  var- 
ious transparent  dodges.  Drama  is  a  two- 
souled  art :  half  divine,  half  clownish.  Shakes- 
peare is  the  greatest  dramatist  who  ever  lived 
because  he  alone,  of  all  dramatists,  most  ac- 
curately sensed  the  mongrel  nature  of  his  art. 
Criticism  of  drama,  it  follows,  is  similarly  a 
two-souled  art:  half  sober,  half  mad.  Drama 
is  a  deliberate  intoxicant;  dramatic  criticism, 
aromatic  spirits  of  ammonia;  the  re-creation  is 
never  perfect;  there  is  always  a  trace  of  tipsi- 
ness  left.  Even  the  best  dramatic  criticism  is 
always  just  a  little  dramatic.  It  indulges,  a 
trifle,  in  acting.  It  can  never  be  as  impersonal, 
however  much  certain  of  its  practitioners  may 
try,  as  criticism  of  painting  or  of  sculpture  or 
of  literature.     This  is  why  the  best  criticism  of 

[20] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
the  theatre  must  inevitably  be  personal  criti- 
cism.    The  theatre  itself  is  distinctly  personal ; 
its  address  is  directly  personal.     It  holds  the 
mirror  not  up  to  nature,  but  to  the  spectator's 
individual   idea  of  nature.     If  it  doesn't,   it 
fails.     The  spectator,  if  he  is  a  critic,  merely 
holds  up  his  own  mirror  to  the  drama's  mirror  : 
a  reflection  of  the  first  reflection  is  the  result. 
Dramatic   criticism   is   this   second   reflection. 
And  so  the  best  dramatic  criticism  has  about 
it  a  flavour  of  the  unconscious,  grotesque  and 
unpremeditated.     "When   Lewes  was   at   his 
business,"  Shaw  has  said,  "he  seldom  remem- 
bered that  he  was  a  gentleman  or  a  scholar." 
(Shaw  was  speaking  of  Lewes'  free  use  of 
vulgarity  and  impudence  whenever  they  hap- 
pened to  be  the  proper  tools  for  his  job.)     "In 
this  he  showed  himself  a  true  craftsman,  in- 
tent on  making  the  measurements  and  analyses 
of   his    criticism   as    accurate,    and   their    ex- 
pression as  clear  and  vivid,  as  possible,  instead 
of  allowing  himself  to  be  distracted  by  the 
vanity  of  playing  the  elegant  man  of  letters, 
or  writing  with  perfect  good  taste,  or  hinting 

[21] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
in  every  line  that  he  was  above  his  work.  In 
exacting  all  this  from  himself,  and  taking  his 
revenge  by  expressing  his  most  laboured  con- 
clusions with  a  levity  that  gave  them  the  air 
of  being  the  unpremeditated  whimsicalities  of 
a  man  who  had  perversely  taken  to  writing 
about  the  theatre  foi^  the  sake  of  the  jest 
latent  in  his  own  outrageous  unfitness  for  it, 
Lewes  rolled  his  stone  up  the  hill  quite  in  the 
modern  manner  of  Mr.  Walkley,  dissembling 
its  huge  weight,  and  apparently  kicking  it  at 
random  hither  and  thither  in  pure  wanton- 
ness." 

Mr.  Spingarn,  in  his  exceptionally  interest- 
ing, if  somewhat  overly  indignant,  treatise  on 
"Creative  Criticism,"  provides,  it  seems  to  me, 
a  particularly  clear  illustration  of  the  manner 
in  which  the  proponents  of  the  more  modern 
theories  of  criticism  imprison  themselves  in 
the  extravagance  of  their  freedom.  While 
liberating  art  from  all  the  old  rules  of  criti- 
cism, they  simultaneously  confine  criticism 
with  the  new  rules — or  ghosts  of  rules — where- 
with they  free  art.     If  each  work  of  art  is  a 

[22] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
unit,  a  thing  in  itself,  as  is  commonly  agreed, 
why   should   not   each  work   of  criticism   be' 
similarly  a  miit,  a  thing  in  itself?     If  art  is, 
in  each  and  every  case,  a  matter  of  individual 
expression,  why  should  not  criticism,  in  each 
and  every  such  case,   be  similarly  and  rele- 
vantly a  matter  of  individual  expression?     In 
freeing  art  of  definitions,  has   not  criticism 
been  too  severely  defined?     I  beheve  that  it 
has  been.     I  believe  that  there  may  be  as  many 
kmds  of  criticism  as  there  are  kinds  of  art. 
I  believe  that  there  may  be  sound  analytical, 
sound  emotional,  sound   cerebral,   sound  im- 
pressionistic,   sound    destructive,    sound    con- 
structive, and  other  sound  species  of  criticism. 
If  art  knows   no  rules,   criticism  knows   no 
rules— or,  at  least,  none  save  those  that  are 
obvious.     If  Brahms'  scherzo  in  E  flat  minor, 
op.  4,  is  an  entity,  a  work  in  and  of  itself' 
why  shouldn't   Huneker's   criticism   of  it   be 
regarded  as  an  entity,  a  work  in  and  of  itself? 
If  there  is  in  Huneker's  work  inspiration  from 
without,  so,  too,  is  there  in  Brahms':  if  Brahms 
may  be  held  a  unit  in  this  particular  instance 
[23] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
with  no  consideration  of  Chopin,  why  may  not 
Huneker  with  no  consideration  of  Brahms? 

If  this  is  pushing  things  pretty  far,  it  is 
the  Spingarns  who  have  made  the  pushing  nec- 
essary. "Taste,"  says  Mr.  Spingarn,  "must 
reproduce  the  work  of  art  within  itself  in 
order  to  understand  and  judge  it;  and  at  that 
moment  aesthetic  judgment  becomes  nothing 
more  or  less  than  creative  art  itself."  This 
rings  true.  But  granting  the  perfection  of 
the  taste,  why  define  and  Hmit  the  critical 
creative  art  thus  born  of  reproduction?  No 
sooner  has  a  law  been  enunciated,  writes  Mr. 
Spingarn,  than  it  has  been  broken  by  an  artist 
impatient  or  ignorant  of  its  restraints,  and  the 
critics  have  been  obliged  to  explain  away  these 
violations  of  their  laws  or  gradually  to  change 
the  laws  themselves.  If  art,  he  continues,  is 
organic  expression,  and  every  work  of  art  is 
to  be  interrogated  with  the  question,  "What 
has  it  expressed,  and  how  completely?",  there 
is  no  place  for  the  question  whether  it  has 
conformed  to  some  convenient  classification  of 
critics  or  to  some  law  derived  from  this  classi- 

[24] 


Aesthetic  Jurisprudence 
fication.  Once  again,  truly  put.  But  so, 
too,  no  sooner  have  laws  been  enunciated  than 
they  have  been  broken  by  critics  impatient  or 
ignorant  of  their  restraints,  and  the  critics  of 
critics  have  been  obhged  to  explain  away  these 
violations  of  the  laws,  or  gradually  to  change 
the  laws  themselves.  And  so,  too,  have  these 
works  of  criticism  provided  no  place  for  the 
question  whether  they  have  conformed  to  some 
convenient  classification  of  the  critics  of  criti- 
cism or  to  some  law  derived  from  this  classi- 
fication. 

"Criticism,"  said  Carlyle,  his  theories  apart, 
"stands  like  an  interpreter  between  the  in- 
spired and  the  uninspired,  between  the  prophet 
and  those  who  hear  the  melody  of  his  words, 
and  catch  some  glimpse  of  their  material  mean- 
ing, but  understand  not  their  deeper  import." 
This  is  the  best  definition  that  I  know  of. 
It  defines  without  defining;  it  gives  into  the 
keeping  of  the  interpreter  the  hundred  lan- 
guages of  art  and  merely  urges  him,  with 
whatever  means  may  best  and  properly  suit 
his  ends,  to  translate  them  clearly  to  those 
[25] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
that  do  not  understand;  it  sets  him  free  from 
the  very  shackles  which  Carlyle  himself,  re- 
moving from  art,  wound  ii?  turn  about  him. 


[26] 


II.     DRAMA  AS  AN  ART 


II.     DRAMA    AS    AN    ART 


IF  the  best  of  criticism,  in  ithe  familiar 
description  of  Anatole  France,  lies  in 
the  adventure  of  a  soul  among  master- 
pieces, the  best  of  drama  may  perhaps  be 
described  as  the  adventure  of  a  masterpiece 
among  souls.  Drama  is  fine  or  impoverished 
in  the  degree  that  it  evokes  from  such  souls  a 
fitting  and  noble  reaction. 

Drama  is,  in  essence,  a  democratic  art  in 
constant  brave  conflict  with  aristocracy  of  in- 
telligence, soul  and  emotion.  When  drama 
triumphs,  a  masterpiece  Hke  "Hamlet"  comes 
to  life.  When  the  conflict  ends  in  a  draw,  a 
drama  half-way  between  greatness  and  little- 
ness is  the  result — a  drama,  say,  such  as  "El 
Gran  Galeoto."  When  the  struggle  ends  in 
defeat,  the  result  is  a  "Way  Down  East"  or  a 
"Lightnin'."  This,  obviously,  is  not  to  say 
[29] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
that  great  drama  may  not  be  popular  drama, 
nor  popular  drama  great  di-ama,  for  I  speak  of 
drama  here  not  as  this  play  or  that,  but  as  a 
specific  art.  And  it  is  as  a  specific  art  that  it 
finds  its  test  and  trial,  not  in  its  own  intrinsi- 
cally democratic  soul,  but  in  the  extrinsic  aris- 
tocratic soul  that  is  taste,  and  connoisseurship, 
and  final  judgment.  Drama  that  has  come  to 
be  at  once  great  and  popular  has  ever  first  been 
given  the  imprimatur,  not  of  democratic  souls, 
but  of  aristocratic.  Shakespeare  and  Molieje 
triumphed  over  aristocracy  of  intelligence,  soul 
and  emotion  before  that  triumph  was  presently 
carried  on  into  the  domain  of  inferior  intelli- 
gence, soul  and  emotion.  In  our  own  day,  the 
drama  of  Hauptmann,  Shaw  and  the  Ameri- 
can O'Neill  has  come  into  its  popular  own  only 
after  it  first  achieved  the  imprimatur  of  what 
we  may  term  the  unpopular,  or  undemocratic, 
theatres.  Aristocracy  cleared  the  democratic 
path  for  Ibsen,  as  it  cleared  it,  in  so  far  as 
possible,  for  Rostand  and  Hugo  von  Hof- 
mannsthal. 

Great  drama  is  the  rainbow  born  when  the 
[30] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
sun  of  reflection  and  understanding  siniles 
anew  upon  an  intelligence  and  emotion  which 
that  drama  has  respectively  shot  with  gleams 
of  brilliant  lightning  and  drenched  with  the 
rain  of  brilliant  tears.  Great  drama,  like 
great  men  and  gi'eat  women,  is  always  just  a 
little  sad.  Only  idiots  may  be  completely 
happy.  Reflection,  sympathy,  wisdom,  gal- 
lant gentleness,  experience — the  chords  upon 
which  great  drama  is  played — these  are  wistful 
chords.  The  commonplace  urge  that  drama, 
to  be  truly  great,  must  uplift  is,  in  the  sense 
that  the  word  uplift  is  used,  childish.  The 
mission  of  great  drama  is  not  to  make  num- 
skulls glad  that  they  are  alive,  but  to  make 
them  speculate  why  they  are  permitted  to  be 
alive  at  all.  And  since  this  is  the  mission  of 
great  drama — ^if  its  mission  may,  indeed,  be  re- 
duced to  any  phrase — it  combines  within  itself, 
together  with  this  mystical  and  awe-struck  ap- 
peal to  the  proletariat,  a  direct  and  agreeable 
appeal  to  such  persons  as  are,  by  reason  of 
their  metaphysical  perception  and  emotional 
culture,  superior  to  and  contemptuous  of  the 
[31] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
proletariat.  Fine  drama,  in  truth,  is  usually 
just  a  trifle  snobbish.  It  has  no  traffic  with 
such  souls  as  are  readily  to  be  made  to  feel 
"upHfted"  by  spurious  philosophical  nostrums 
and  emotional  sugar  pills.  Its  business  is  with 
what  the  matchless  Dry  den  hailed  "souls  of 
the  highest  rank  and  truest  understanding": 
souls  who  find  a  greater  uplift  in  the  noble  de- 
pressions of  Brahms'  first  trio,  Bartolommeo's 
Madonna  della  Misericordia,  and  Joseph  Con- 
rad's "Youth"  than  in  the  easy  buoyancies  of 
John  Philip  Sousa,  Howard  Chandler  Christy 
and  Rupert  Hughes.  The  aim  of  great  drama 
is  not  to  make  men  happy  with  themselves  as 
they  are,  but  with  themselves  as  they  might, 
yet  alas  cannot,  be.  As  Gautier  has  it,  "The 
aim  of  art  is  not  exact  reproduction  of  nature, 
but  creation,  by  means  of  forms  and  colours,  of 
a  microcosm  wherein  may  be  produced  dreams, 
sensations,  and  ideas  inspired  by  the  aspect  of 
the  world."  If  drama  is  irrevocably  a  demo- 
cratic art  and  uplift  of  the  great  masses  of  men 
its  noblest  end,  ^Irs.  Porter's  "Pollyanna" 
must  endure  as  a  work  of  dramatic  art  a  thou- 

[32] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
sand  times  finer  than  Corneille's  "Polyeucte." 
Drama  has  been  strictly  defined  by  the  rit- 
ualists in  a  dozen  different  ways.  "Drama," 
says  one,  "must  be  based  on  character,  and  the 
action  proceed  from  character."  "Drama," 
stipulates  another,  "is  not  an  imitation  of  men, 
but  of  an  action  and  of  life :  character  is  subsid- 
iary to  action."  "Drama,"  promulgates  still 
another,  "is  the  struggle  of  a  will  against  ob- 
stacles." And  so  on,  so  on.  Rules,  rules  and 
more  rules.  Pigeon-holes  upon  pigeon-holes. 
Good  drama  is  anything  that  interests  an  in- 
telligently emotional  group  of  persons  assem- 
bled together  in  ,an  illuminated  hall.  Mo- 
liere,  wise  among  dramatists,  said  as  much, 
though  in  somewhat  more,  and  doubtless  too, 
sweeping  words.  Throughout  the  ages  of 
drama  there  will  be  always  Romanticists  of 
one  sort  or  another,  brave  and  splendid  spirits, 
who  will  have  to  free  themselves  from  the  defi- 
nitions and  limitations  imposed  upon  them  by 
the  neo-Bossus  and  Boileaus,  and  the  small 
portion  Voltaires,  La  Harpes  and  Marmon- 
tels.  Drama  is  struggle,  a  conflict  of  wills? 
[33] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Then  what  of  "Ghosts"?  Drama  is  action? 
Then  what  of  "Nachtasyl"  ?  Drama  is  charac- 
ter? Then  what  of  "The  Dream  Play"?  "A 
'character'  upon  the  stage,"  wrote  the  author 
of  the  last  named  drama,  "has  become  a  crea- 
ture ready-made — a  mere  mechanism  that 
drives  the  man — I  do  not  beheve  in  these  the- 
atrical 'characters.'  " 

Of  all  the  higher  arts,  drama  is  perhaps  the 
simplest  and  easiest.  Its  anatomy  is  com- 
posed of  all  the  other  arts,  higih  and  low,  strip- 
ped to  their  elementals.  It  is  a  synthesis  of 
those  portions  of  these  other  arts  that,  being 
elemental,  are  most  easily  assimilable  on  the 
part  of  the  multitude.  It  is  a  snatch  of  music, 
a  bit  of  painting,  a  moment  of  dancing,  a  sHce 
of  sculpture,  draped  upon  the  skeleton  of 
literature.  At  its  highest,  it  ranks  with  litera- 
ture, but  never  above  it.  One  small  notch 
below,  and  it  ranks  only  with  itself,  in  its 
own  isolated  and  generically  peculiar  field. 
Drama,  indeed,  is  dancing  literature :  a  hybrid 
art.  It  is  often  purple  and  splendid;  it  is 
often  profoundly  beautiful  and  profoundly 

[34] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
moving.  Yet,  with  a  direct  appeal  to  the  emo- 
tions as  its  first  and  encompassing  aim,  it  has 
never,  even  at  its  finest,  been  able  to  exercise 
the  measure  of  direct  emotional  appeal  that  is 
exercised,,  say,  by  Chopin's  C  shai'p  minor 
Nocturne,  op.  27,  No.  1,  or  by  the  soft  romance 
of  the  canvases  of  Palma  Vecchio,  or  by 
Rodin's  superb  "Eternal  Spring,"  or  by  Zola's 
"La  Terre."  It  may,  at  its  finest  as  at  its 
worst,  of  course  subjugate  and  triumph  over 
inexperienced  emotionalism,  but  the  greatest 
drama  of  Shakespeare  himself  has  never,  in  the 
truthful  confession  of  cultivated  emotional- 
ism, influenced  that  emotionalism  as  has  the 
greatest  literature,  or  the  greatest  music,  or 
the  greatest  \pa|ti±ing  or  sculpture.  The 
splendid  music  of  "Romeo"  or  "Hamlet"  is 
not  so  eloquent  and  moving  as  that  of 
"Tristan"  or  "Lohengrin";  no  situation  in 
the  whole  of  Hauptmann  can  strike  in  the 
heart  so  thrilling  and  profound  a  chord  of  pity 
as  a  single  line  in  Allegri's  obvious  "Miserere." 
The  greatest  note  of  comedy  in  drama  falls 
short  of  the  note  of  comedy  in  the  "Coffee- 
[35] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Cantata"  of  Bach;  the  greatest  note  of  ironic 
remorse  falls  short  of  that  in  the  scherzo  in  B 
minor  of  Chopin ;  the  greatest  intellectual  note 
falls  short  of  that  in  the  first  and  last  move- 
ments of  the  C  minor  symphony  of  Brahms. 
What  play  of  Sudermann's  has  the  direct  ap- 
peal of  "The  Indian  Lily"?  What  play  made 
out  of  Hardy's  "Tess,"  however  adroitly  con- 
trived, retains  the  powerful  apj^eal  of  the  orig- 
inal piece  of  literature?  To  descend,  what 
obvious  thrill  melodrama,  designed  frankly  for 
dollars,  has — with  all  its  painstaking  and  de- 
liberate intent — yet  succeeded  in  provoking 
half  the  thrill  and  shock  of  the  obvious  second 
chapter  of  Andreas  Latzko's  equally  obvious 
"Men  in  War"? 

Art  is  an  evocation  of  beautiful  emotions: 
art  is  art  in  the  degree  that  it  succeeds  in  this 
evocation:  drama  succeeds  in  an  inferior  de- 
gree. Whatever  emotion  drama  may  succeed 
brilliantly  in  evoking,  another  art  succeeds  in 
evoking  more  brilliantly. 


[36] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
n 

Although,  of  course,  one  speaks  of  drama 
here  primarily  in  the  sense  of  acted  di'ama,  it 
is  perhaps  not  necessary  so  strictly  to  confine 
one's  self.  For  when  the  critic  confines  him- 
self in  his  discussion  of  drama  to  the  acted 
drama,  he  regularly  brings  upon  himself  from 
other  critics — chiefly  bookish  fellows  whose 
theatrical  knowledge  is  meagre — the  very 
largely  unwarranted  embarrassment  of  argu- 
ments anent  "crowd  psychology"  and  the  like 
which,  while  they  have  little  or  nothing  to  do 
with  the  case,  none  the  less  make  a  certain 
deep  impression  upon  his  readers.  (Readers 
of  criticism  become  automatically  critics;  with 
his  first  sentence,  the  critic  challenges  his  critic- 
reader's  sense  of  argument.)  This  constantly 
advanced  contention  of  "crowd  psychology," 
of  which  drama  is  supposed  to  be  at  once  mas- 
ter and  slave,  has  small  place  in  a  considera- 
tion of  drama,  from  whatever  sound  point  of 
view  one  elects  to  consider  the  latter.  If 
"crowd  psychology"  operates  in  the  case  of 
[37] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
theatre  drama,  it  operates  also  in  the  case  of 
concert-hall  music.  Yet  no  one  so  far  as  I 
know  seriously  maintains  that,  in  a  criticism  of 
music,  this  "crowd  psychology"  has  any  place. 
I  have  once  before  pointed  out  that,  even 
accepting  the  theory  of  crowd  psychology  and 
its  direct  and  indirect  implications  so  far  as 
drama  is  concerned,  it  is  as  nonsensical  to  as- 
sume that  one  thousand  persons  assembled  to- 
gether before  a  drama  in  a  theatre  are,  by  rea- 
son of  their  constituting  a  crowd,  any  more 
likely  to  be  moved  automatically  than  the  same 
crowd  of  one  thousand  persons  assembled  to- 
igether  before  a  painting  in  an  art  gallery. 
Furthermore,  the  theory  that  collective  intelli- 
gence and  emotionalism  are  a  more  facile  and 
ingenuous  intelligence  and  emotionalism,  while 
it  may  hold  full  water  in  the  psychological 
laboratory,  holds  little  in  actual  external  dem- 
onstration, particularly  in  any  consideration 
of  a  crowd  before  one  of  the  arts.  While  it 
may  be  true  that  the  Le  Bon  and  Tarde  the- 
ory applies  aptly  to  the  collective  psychology 
of  a  crowd  at  a  prize-fight  or  a  bull-fight  or 

[38] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
a  circus,  one  may  be  permitted  severe  doubts 
that  it  holds  equally  true  of  a  crowd  in  a 
theatre  or  in  an  art  gallery  or  in  a  concert  hall. 
The  tendency  of  such  a  latter  group  is  not 
aesthetically  downward,  but  upward.  And 
not  only  aesthetically,  but  intellectually  and 
emotionally.  (I  speak,  of  course,  and  with 
proper  relevance,  of  a  crowd  assembled  to  hear 
good  drama  or  good  music,  or  to  see  good 
painting.  The  customary  obscuring  tactic  of 
critics  in  this  situation  is  to  argue  out  the  prin- 
ciples of  intelligent  reaction  to  good  drama  in 
terms  of  yokel  reaction  to  bad  drama.  Analy- 
sis of  the  principles  of  sound  theatre  drama 
and  the  reaction  of  a  group  of  eight  hundred 
citizens  of  Marion,  Ohio,  to  "The  Two  Or- 
phans" somehow  do  not  seem  to  me  to  be 
especially  apposite.)  The  fine  drama  or  the 
fine  piece  of  music  does  not  make  its  auditor 
part  of  a  crowd;  it  removes  him,  and  every 
one  else  in  the  crowd,  from  the  crowd,  and 
makes  him  an  individual.  The  crowd  ceases 
to  exist  as  a  crowd;  it  becomes  a  crowd  of 
units,  of  separate  individuals.     The  dramas  of 

[39] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Mr.  Owen  Davis  make  crowds;  the  dramas 
of  Shakespeare  make  individuals. 

The  argument  to  the  contrary  always  some- 
what grotesquely  assumes  that  the  crowd  as- 
sembled at  a  fine  play,  and  promptly  suscep- 
tible to  group  psychology,  is  a  new  crowd, 
one  that  has  never  attended  a  fine  play  before. 
Such  an  assumption  falls  to  pieces  in  two  ways. 
Firstly,  it  is  beyond  reason  to  believe  that  it 
is  true  in  more  than  one  instance  out  of  a 
hundred;  and  secondly  it  would  not  be  true 
even  if  it  were  true.  For,  granting  that  a 
crowd  of  one  thousand  persons  were  seeing 
great  drama  for  the  first  time  in  their  lives, 
what  reason  is  there  for  beheving  that  the 
majority  of  persons  in  the  crowd  who  had 
never  seen  gi^eat  drama  and  didn't  know 
exactly  what  to  make  of  it  would  be  swayed 
and  influenced  by  the  minority  who  had  never 
seen  great  drama  but  did  know  what  to  make 
of  it?  If  this  were  true,  no  great  drama  could 
ever  possibly  fail  in  the  commercial  theatre. 
Or,  to  test  the  hypothesis  further,  take  it  the 
other  way  round.     What  reason  is  there  for 

[40] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
believing  that  the  majority  in  this  crowd  would 
be  moved  the  one  way  or  the  other,  either  by 
a  minority  that  did  understand  the  play,  or  did 
not  understand  it?  Or  take  it  in  another  way 
still.  What  reason  is  there  for  believing  that 
the  minority  in  this  crowd  who  did  know  what 
the  drama,  was  about  would  be  pei'suaded 
emotionally  by  the  majority  who  did  not  know 
what  the  drama  was  about? 

Theories,  and  again  theories.  But  the  facts 
fail  to  support  them.  Take  the  lowest  type  of 
crowd  imaginable,  one  in  which  there  is  not 
one  cultured  man  in  a  thousand — the  crowd, 
say,  at  a  professional  American  baseball  game 
— and  pack  it  into  an  American  equivalent  for 
Reinhardt's  Grosses  Schauspielhaus.  The 
play,  let  us  say,  is  "Oedipus  Rex."  At  the 
ball  game,  the  crowd  psychology  of  Le  Bon 
operated  to  the  full.  But  what  now?  Would 
the  crowd,  in  the  theatre  and  before  a  great 
drama,  be  the  same  crowd?  Would  it  not  be 
an  entirely  different  crowd?  Would  not  its 
group  psychology  promptly  and  violently  suf- 
fer a  sudden  change  ?  Whether  out  of  curios- 
[41] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
ity,  disgust,  admiration,  social  shame  or  what 
not,  would  it  not  rapidly  segregate  itself, 
spiritually  or  physically,  into  various  groups? 
What  is  the  Le  Bon  theatrical  view  of  the 
crowd  psychology  that  somehow  didn't  come 
off  during  the  initial  engagement  of  Barrie's 
"Peter  Pan"  in  Washington,  D.  C?  Or  of 
the  crowd  psychology  that  worked  the  other 
way  round  when  Ibsen  was  first  played  in  Lon- 
don? Or  of  the  crowd  psychology  that,  op- 
erating regularly,  if  artificially,  at  the  New 
York  premieres,  most  often  fails,  for  all  its 
high  enthusiasm,  to  move  either  the  minority 
or  the  majority  in  its  composition? 

The  question  of  sound  drama  and  the  pack 
psychology  of  a  congress  of  groundlings  is  a 
fatuous  one:  it  gets  nowhere.  Sound  drama 
and  sound  audiences  are  alone  to  be  considered 
at  one  and  the  same  time.  And,  as  I  have 
noted,  the  tendency  of  willing,  or  even  semi- 
willing,  auditors  and  spectators  is  in  an  up- 
ward direction,  not  a  downward.  No  intelli- 
gent spectator  at  a  performance  of  "Ben  Hur" 
has  ever  been  made  to  feel  like  throwing  his 

[42] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
hat  into  the  air  and  cheering  by  the  similar 
actions  of  the  mob  spectators  to  the  left  and 
right  of  him.  No  ignoble  auditor  of  "The 
Laughter  of  the  Gods"  but  has  been  made  to 
feel,  in  some  part,  the  contagion  of  cultivated 
appreciation  to  his  left  and  right.  "I  forget," 
wrote  Sarcey,  in  a  consideration  of  the  sub- 
ject of  which  we  have  been  treating,  "what 
tyrant  it  was  of  ancient  Greece  to  whom  mas- 
sacres were  everyday  affairs,  but  who  wept 
copiously  over  the  misfortunes  of  a  heroine  in 
a  tragedy.  He  was  the  audience ;  and  for  the 
one  evening  clothed  himself  in  the  sentiments 
of  the  public."  A  typical  example  of  sophis- 
ticated reasoning.  How  does  Sarcey  know 
that  it  was  not  the  rest  of  the  audience — the 
crowd — that  was  influenced  by  this  repentant 
and  copiously  lachrymose  individual,  rather 
than  that  it  was  this  individual  who  was  moved 
by  the  crowd  ? 

If  fallacies  perchance  insinuate  themselves 

into  these  opposing  contentions,  it  is  a  case  of 

fallacy  versus  fallacy :  my  intent  is  not  so  much 

to  prove  anything  as  to  indicate  the  presence 

[43] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
of  holes  in  the  proofs  of  the  other  side.  These 
holes  seem  to  me  to  be  numerous,  and  of  con- 
siderable circumference.  A  description  of  two 
of  them  may  suffice  to  suggest  the  rest.  Take, 
as  the  first  of  these,  the  familar  Castelvetro 
doctrine  that,  since  a  theatrical  audience  is  not 
a  select  congress  but  a  motley  crowd,  the  dram- 
atist, ever  conscious  of  the  group  psychology, 
must  inevitably  avoid  all  themes  and  ideas  un- 
intelligible to  such  a  gathering.  It  may  be 
true  that  a  theatrical  audience  is  not  a  select 
congress,  but  why  confine  the  argument  to 
theatrical  audiences  and  seek  thus  to  prove 
something  of  drama  that  may  be  proved  as 
well — if  one  is  given  to  such  idiosyncrasies — 
of  music?  What,  as  I  have  said  before,  of 
opera  and  concert  hall  audiences?  Consider 
the  average  audience  at  Covent  Garden,  the 
Metropolitan,  Carnegie  Hall.  Is  it  any  way 
culturally  superior  to  the  average  audience  at 
the  St.  James's  Theatre,  or  the  Theatre  de 
rOeuvre,  or  the  Plymouth — or  even  the  Neigh- 
bourhood Playhouse  down  in  Grand  Street? 
What  of  the  audiences  who  attended  the  origi- 

[44] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
nal  performances  of  Beethoven's  "Leonore" 
("Fidelio"),  Berlioz's  "Benvenuto  Cellini," 
the  original  performances  of  Wagner  in 
France  and  the  performances  of  his  "Der  Flie- 
gende  Hollander"  in  Germany,  the  operas  of 
Handel  in  England  in  the  years  1733-37,  the 
work  of  Rossini  in  Italy,  the  concerts  of 
Chopin  during  his  tour  of  England  and  Scot- 
land? .  .  .  Again,  as  to  the  imperative  ne- 
cessity of  the  dramatist's  avoidance  of  all 
themes  and  ideas  unintelligible  to  a  mob  audi- 
ence, what  of  the  success  among  such  very 
audiences  of — to  name  but  a  few  more  recent 
profitably  produced  and  locally  readily  rec- 
ognizable examples — Shaw's  "Getting  Mar- 
ried," Augustus  Thomas'  "The  Witching 
Hour,"  Ibsen's  "The  Wild  Duck,"  Dunsany's 
"The  Laughter  of  the  Gods,"  Barries  "Mary 
Hose,"  Strindberg's  "The  Father,"  Synge's 
"Playboy"?  .  .  .  Surely  it  will  be  quickly 
allowed  that  however  obvious  the  themes  and 
ideas  of  these  plays  may  be  to  the  few,  they 
are;  hardly  within  the  ready  intelligence  of 
what  the  theorists  picture  as  the  imaginary 
[45] 


The  Clitic  and  the  Drama 
mob  theatre  audience.     Fine  drama  is  inde- 
jpendent  of  all  such  theories:  the  dramatist 
who  subscribes  to  them  should  not  figure  in  any 
treatise  upon  drama  as  an  art. 

A  second  illustration:  the  equivocation  to 
the  effect  that  drama,  being  a  democratic  art, 
may  not  properly  be  evaluated  in  terms  of 
more  limited,  and  aristocratic,  taste.  It  seems 
t}[>  mej,  at  least,  an  idiotic  assumption  that 
drama  is  a  more  democratic  art  than  music. 
All  great  art  is  democratic  in  intention,  if 
not  in  reward.  Michelangelo,  Shakespeare, 
Wagner  and  Zola  are  democratic  artists,  and 
their  art  democratic  art.  It  is  criticism  of 
Michelangelo,  Shakespeare,  Wagner  and  Zola 
that  is  aristocratic.  Criticism,  not  art,  gener- 
ically  wears  the  ermine  and  the  purple.  To 
appraise  a  democratic  art  in  terms  of  democ- 
racy is  to  attempt  to  effect  a  chemical  reac- 
tion in  nitrogen  with  nitrogen.  If  drama  is, 
critically,  a  democratic  art  since  it  is  meant 
not  to  be  read  by  the  few  but  to  be  played  be- 
fore the  many,  music  must  be  critically  no  less 
a  democratic  art.     Yet  the  theorists  conven- 

[46] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
iently  overlook  this  embarrassment.  Never- 
theless, if  Shakespeare's  dramas  were  designed 
for  the  heterogeneous  ear,  so,  too,  were  the 
songs  of  Schumann.  No  great  artist  has  ever 
in  his  heart  deliberately  fashioned  his  work  for 
a  remote  and  forgotten  cellar,  dark  and  stair- 
less. He  fashions  it,  for  all  his  doubts,  in  the 
hope  of  hospitable  eyes  and  ears,  and  in  the 
hope  of  a  sun  to  shine  upon  it.  It  is  as  ridic- 
ulous to  argue  that  because  Shakespeare's  is 
a  democratic  art  it  must  be  criticized  in  terms 
of  democratic  reaction  to  it  as  it  would  be  to  ar- 
gue that  because  the  United  States  is  a  democ- 
racy the  most  acute  and  comprehensive  criti- 
cism of  that  democracy  must  lie  in  a  native 
democrat's  reaction  to  it.  "To  say  that  the 
theatre  is  for  the  people,"  says  Gordon  Craig, 
"is  necessary.  But  to  forget  to  add  that  part 
and  parcel  of  the  people  is  the  aristocracy, 
whether  of  birth  or  feeling,  is  an  omission.  A 
man  of  the  eighteenth  century,  dressed  in  silks, 
in  a  fashionable  loggia  in  the  theatre  at  Ver- 
sailles, looking  as  if  he  did  no  work  (as  Vol- 
taire in  his  youth  may  have  looked),  presents. 


Tlie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
in  essence,  exactly  the  same  picture  as  Walt 
Whitman  in  his  rough  gray  suit  lounging  in 
the  Bowery,  also  looking  as  if  he  did  no  work. 
.  .  .  One  the  aristocrat,  one  the  democrat:  the 
two  are  identical." 


Ill 

"Convictions,"  said  Nietzsche,  "are  prisons." 
Critical  "theories,"  with  negligible  exception, 
seek  to  denude  the  arts  of  their  splendid,  gipsy 
gauds  and  to  force  them  instead  to  don  so 
many  dupHcated  black  and  white  striped  uni- 
forms. Of  all  the  arts,  drama  has  suffered 
most  in  this  regard.  Its  critics,  from  the  time 
of  Ai'istotle,  have  bound  and  fettered  it,  and 
have  then  urged  it  impassionedly  to  soar. 
Yet,  despite  its  shackles,  it  has  triumphed,  and 
each  triumph  has  been  a  derision  of  one  of  its 
most  famous  and  distinguished  critics.  It 
triimiphed,  through  Shakespeare,  over  Aristo- 
tle; it  triumphed,  through  Moliere,  over  Cas- 
telvetro;  it  triumphed,  through  Lemercier, 
over  Diderot;  it  triumphed,  through  Lessing, 

[48] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
over  Voltaire;  it  triumphed,  through  Ibsen, 
over  Flaubert;  it  has  triumphed,  through 
Hauptmami,  over  Sarcey  and,  through 
Schnitzler  and  Bernard  Shaw,  over  Mr. 
Archer.  The  truth  perhaps  is  that  drama  is 
an  art  as  flexible  as  the  imaginations  of  its 
audiences.  It  is  no  more  to  be  bound  by  rules 
and  theories  than  such  imaginations  are  to  be 
bound  by  rules  and  theories.  Who  so  all- 
wise  that  he  may  say  by  what  rules  or  set  of 
rules  living  imaginations  and  imaginations  yet 
unborn  are  to  be  fanned  into  theatrical  flame  ? 
"Imagination,"  Samuel  Johnson's  words  apply 
to  auditor  as  to  artist,  "a  hcentious  and  va- 
grant faculty,  unsusceptible  of  limitations  and 
impatient  of  lestraint,  has  always  endeav- 
oured to  baffle  the  logician,  to  perplex  the 
confines  of  distinction,  and  burst  the  inclosures 
of  regularity."  And  fm'ther,  "There  is  there- 
fore scarcely  any  species  of  writing  of  which 
we  can  tell  what  is  its  essence,  and  what  are 
its  constituents;  every  new  genius  produces 
some  innovation  which,  when  invented  and 
approved,  subverts  the  rules  which  the  prac- 
[49] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
tice    of    foregoing   authors   had   estabhshed." 

Does  the  play  interest,  and  whom?  This 
seems  to  me  to  be  the  only  doctrine  of  dramatic 
criticism  that  is  capable  of  supporting  itself 
soundly.  First,  does  the  play  interest?  In 
other  words,  how  far  has  the  dramatist  suc- 
ceeded in  expressing  himself,  and  the  materials 
before  him,  intelligently,  eloquently,  symmet- 
rically, beautifully?  So  much  for  the  criti- 
cism of  the  dramatist  as  an  artist.  In  the 
second  place,  whom  does  the  play  interest? 
Does  it  interest  inferior  persons,  or  does  it 
interest  cultivated  and  artistically  sensitive 
persons?  So  much  for  the  criticism  of  the 
artist  as  a  dramatist. 

The  major  difficulty  with  critics  of  the 
drama  has  always  been  that,  having  once  posi' 
tively  enunciated  their  critical  credos,  they 
have  been  constrained  to  devote  their  entire 
subsequent  enterprise  and  ingenuity  to  defend- 
ing the  fallacies  therein.  Since  a  considerable 
number  of  these  critics  have  been,  and  are, 
extraordinarily  shrewd  and  ingenious  men, 
these  defences  of  error  have  often  been  con- 

[50] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
trived  with  such  persuasive  dexterity  and  rea- 
sonableness that  they  have  endured  beyond  the 
more  sound  doctrines  of  less  deft  critics,  doc- 
trines which,  being  sound,  have  suffered  the 
rebuffs  that  gaunt,  grim  logic,  ever  unprepos- 
sessing and  unhypnotic,  suffers  always.  "I 
hope  that  I  am  right;  if  I  am  not  right,  I  am 
still  right,"  said  Brunetiexe.  "Mr.  William 
Archer  is  not  only,  like  myself,  a  convinced, 
inflexible  determinist,"  Henry  Arthur  Jones 
has  written,  "I  am  persuaded  that  he  is  also, 
unlike  myself,  a  consistent  one.  I  am  sure  he 
takes  care  that  his  practice  agi'ees  with  his 
opinions — even  when  they  are  wrong."  Dra- 
matic criticism  is  an  attempt  to  formulate  rules 
of  conduct  for  the  lovable,  wayward,  charming, 
wilful  vagabond  that  is  the  drama.  For  the 
drama  is  an  art  with  a  feather  in  its  cap  and 
an  ironic  smile  upon  its  lips,  sauntering  impu- 
dently over  forbidden  lawns  and  through 
closed  lanes  into  the  hearts  of  those  of  us 
children  of  the  world  who  have  never  grown 
up.  Beside  literature,  it  is  the  Mother  Goose 
of  the  arts :  a  gorgeous  and  empurpled  Mother 
[51] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Goose  for  the  fireside  of  impressible  and  ro- 
mantic youth  that,  looking  upward,  leans  ever 
hushed  and  expectant  at  the  knee  of  life.  It 
is  a  fairy  tale  told  reaUstically,  a  ti*ue  story 
told  as  romance.  It  is  the  lullaby  of  disillu- 
sion, the  chimes  without  the  cathedral,  the 
fears  and  hopes  and  di'eams  and  passions  of 
those  who  cannot  fully  fear  and  hope  and 
dream  and  flame  of  themselves. 
,  "The  drama  must  have  reality,"  so  Mr.  P. 
P.  Howe  in  his  engaging  volmiie  of  "Dra- 
matic Portraits,"  "but  the  fli'st  essential  to  our 
understanding  of  an  art  is  that  we  should  not 
believe  it  to  be  actual  life.  The  spectator  who 
shouts  his  warning  and  advice  to  the  heroine 
when  the  villain  is  approaching  is,  in  the  thea- 
tre, the  only  true  believer  in  the  hand  of  God ; 
and  he  is  liable  to  find  it  in  a  drama  lower  than 
the  best."  The  art  of  the  drama  is  one  which 
imposes  upon  drama  the  obligation  of  depict- 
ing at  once  the  inner  processes  of  life  realisti- 
cally, and  the  external  aspects  of  life  delu- 
sively. Properly  and  sympathetically  to  ap- 
preciate drama,  one  must  look  upon  it  synchro- 

[52] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
nously  with  two  different  eyes:  the  one  argu- 
ing against  the  other  as  to  the  truth  of  what  it 
sees,  and  triumphing  over  this  doubtful  other 
with  the  full  force  of  its  sophistry.  Again  in- 
evitably to  quote  Coleridge,  "Stage  presenta- 
tions are  to  produce  a  sort  of  temporary  half- 
faith,  which  the  spectator  encourages  in  him- 
self and  supports  by  a  voluntary  contribution 
on  his  own  part,  because  he  knows  that  it  is 
at  all  times  in  his  power  to  see  the  thing  as  it 
really  is.  Thus  the  true  stage  illusion  as  to  a 
forest  scene  consists,  not  in  the  mind's  judging 
it  to  be  a  forest,  but  in  its  remission  of  the 
judgment  that  it  is  not  a  forest."  This  ob- 
viously applies  to  drama  as  well  as  to  dra- 
matic investiture.  One  never  for  a  moment 
believes  absolutely  that  Mr.  John  Barrymore 
is  Richard  III;  one  merely  agrees,  for  the 
sake  of  Shakespeare,  who  has  written  the  play, 
and  Mr.  Hopkins,  wiho  has  cast  it,  that  Mr. 
John  Barrymore  is  Richard  III,  that  one  may 
receive  the  ocular,  aural  and  mental  sensa- 
tions for  which  one  has  paid  three  dollars  and 
a  half.  Nor  does  one  for  a  moment  believe 
[53] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
that  Mr.  Walter  Hampden,  whom  that  very 
evening  one  has  seen  dividing  a  brobdingna- 
gian  dish  of  goulash  with  Mr.  Oliver  llerford 
in  the  Player's  Club  and  discussing  the  pros- 
pects of  the  White  Sox,  is  actually  speaking 
extemporaneously  the  rare  verbal  embroider- 
ies of  Shakespeare;  or  that  Miss  Ethel  Barry- 
more  who  is  billed  in  front  of  Browne's  Chop 
House  to  take  a  star  part  in  the  Actors' 
Equity  Association's  benefit,  is  really  the 
queen  of  a  distant  kingdom. 

llie  dramatist,  in  the  thf.atre,  is  not  a 
worker  in  actualities,  but  in  the  essence  of  ac- 
tualities that  filters  through  the  self-decep- 
tion of  his  spectators.  There  is  no  such  thing 
as  realism  in  the  theatre:  there  is  only  mimi- 
cry of  realism.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
romance  in  the  theatre:  there  is  only  mimicry 
of  romance.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
an  automatic  dramatic  susceptibility  in  a  thea- 
tre audience:  there  is  only  a  volitional  dra- 
matic susceptibility.  Thus,  it  'is  absurd  to 
speak  of  the  drama  holding  the  mirror  up  to 
nature;  all  that  the  drama  can  do  is  to  hold 

[54] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
nature  up  to  its  own  peculiar  mirror  which, 
Hke  that  in  a  pleasure-park  carousel,  amus- 
ingly fattens  up  nature,  or  shrinks  it,  yet  does 
not  at  any  time  render  it  unrecognizable. 
One  does  not  go  to  the  theatre  to  see  hfe  and 
nature;  one  goes  to  see  the  particular  way  in 
which  life  and  nature  happen  to  look  to  a  cul- 
tivated, imaginative  and  entertaining  man 
who  happens,  in  turn,  to  be  a  playwright. 
Drama  is  the  surprising  pulling  of  a  perfectly 
obvious,  every-day  rabbit  out  of  a  perfectly 
obvious,  every-day  silk  hat.  The  spectator  has 
seen  thousands  of  rabbits  and  thousands  of 
silk  hats,  but  he  has  never  seen  a  silk  hat  that 
had  a  rabbit  concealed  in  it,  and  he  is  curious 
about  it. 

But  if  drama  is  essentially  mimetic,  so  also 
— as  Professor  Gilbert  Mm-ray  impHes — is 
criticism  essentially  mimetic  in  that  it  is  rep- 
resentative of  the  work  criticized.  It  is  con- 
ceivable that  one  may  criticize  Mr.  Ziegfeld's 
"Folhes"  in  terms  of  the  "Philoctetes"  of 
Theodectes — I  myself  have  been  guilty  of 
«yen  more  exceptional  feats;  it  is  not  only 

[55] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
conceivable,  but  of  common  occurrence,  for 
certain  of  oui*  academic  American  critics  to 
criticize  the  plays  of  Mr.  Shaw  in  terms  of 
Scribe  and  Sardou,  and  with  a  perfectly 
straight  if  ace;  but  Criticism  in  general  is  a 
chameleon  that  takes  on  something  of  the 
colour  of  the  pattern  upon  which  it  imposes 
itself.  There  is  drama  in  Horace's  "Epis- 
tola  ad  Pisones,"  a  criticism  of  drama.  There 
is  the  spirit  of  comedy  in  Hazlitt's  essay  "On 
the  Comic  Writers  of  ^the  Last  Century." 
Dryden's  "Essay  on  Dramatic  Poesy"  is 
poetry.  There  is  something  of  the  music 
of  Chopin  in  Huneker's  critical  essays  on 
Chopin,  and  some  of  Mary  Garden's  spectac- 
ular liistrionism  in  his  essay  on  her  acting. 
Walkley,  criticizing  "L'Enfant  Prodigue," 
uses  the  pen  of  Pierrot.  Criticism,  more  than 
drama  with  her  mirror  toward  nature,  holds 
the  mirror  up  to  the  nature  of  the  work  it 
criticizes.  Its  end  is  the  revivification  of  the 
passion  of  art  which  has  been  spent  in  its  be- 
half, but  under  the  terms  laid  down  by  Plato. 
Its  aim  is  to  reconstruct  a  great  work  of  art 

[56] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
on  a  diminutive  scale,  that  eyes  which  are  not 
capable  of  gazing  on  high  may  have  it  within 
the  reach  of  their  vision.  Its  aim  is  to  play 
again  all  the  full  richness  of  the  artist's  emo- 
tional organ  tones,  in  so  far  as  is  possible,  on 
the  cold  cerebral  xylophone  that  is  criticism's 
deficient  instrmnent.  In  the  accomplishment 
of  these  aims,  it  is  bound  by  no  laws  that  art 
is  not  bound  by.  There  is  but  one  rule :  there 
are  no  rules.     Ai't  laughs  at  locksmiths. 

It  has  been  a  favourite  diversion  of  critics 
since  Aristotle's  day  to  argue  that  drama  is 
drama,  whether  one  reads  it  from  a  printed 
page  or  sees  it  enacted  in  a  theati'e.  Great 
drama,  they  announce,  is  great  drama  whether 
it  ever  be  acted  or  not;  "it  speaks  with  the 
same  voice  in  solitude  as  in  crowds";  and  "all 
the  more  then" — again  I  quote  Mr.  Spingarn 
— "will  the  drama  itself  'even  apart  from  rep- 
resentation and  actors,'  as  old  Aristotle  puts 
it,  speak  with  its  highest  power  to  the  imag- 
ination fitted  'to  understand  and  receive 
it."  Upon  this  point  of  view  much  of  the 
academic  criticism  of  drama  has  been  based. 
[57] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
But  may  we  not  well  reply  that,  for  all 
the  fact  that  Shakespeare  would  still  be  the 
greatest  dramatist  who  ever  lived  had  he 
never  been  played  in  the  theatre,  so,  too, 
would  Bach  still  be  the  greatest  composer  who 
ever  lived  had  his  compositions  never  been 
played  at  all?  If  drama  is  not  meant  for  ac- 
tors, may  we  not  also  argue  that  music  is  not 
meant  for  instruments?  Are  not  such  exped- 
ients less  sound  criticism  than  clever  evasion 
of  sound  criticism:  a  frolicsome  and  agreeable 
straddling  of  the  aesthetic  see-saw?  There  is 
the  printed  drama — criticize  it.  There  is  the 
same  drama  acted — criticize  it.  Why  quib- 
ble? Sometimes,  as  in  the  case  of  "Gio- 
conda"  and  Duse,  they  are  one.  Well  and 
good.  Sometimes,  as  in  the  case  of  "Chan- 
tecler"  and  Maude  Adams,  they  are  not  one. 
Well  and  good.  But  where,  in  either  case, 
the  confusion  that  the  critics  lay  such  stress 
upon?  These  critics  deal  not  with  theories, 
but  with  mere  words.  They  take  two  dozen 
empty  words  and  adroitly  seek  therewith  to 
fashion    a    fecund    theory.     The    result    is — 

[58] 


Drama  As  an  Art 
words.  "Words  which,"  said  Ruskin,  "if 
they  are  not  watched,  will  do  deadly  work 
sometimes.  There  are  masked  words  droning 
and  skulking  about  us  just  now  .  .  .  (there 
never  were  so  many,  owing  to  the  teaching 
of  catechisms  and  phrases  at  school  instead  of 
human  meanings )  .  .  .  there  never  were  crea- 
tures of  prey  so  mischievous,  never  diplo- 
matists so  cunning,  never  poisoners  so  deadly, 
as  these  masked  words:  they  are  the  unjust 
stewards  of  men's  ideas.  ..." 


[59] 


III.     THE  PLACE  OF  THE 
THEATRE 


III.     THE  PLACE  OF  THE 
THEATRE 


THE  theatre  stands  in  relation  to  drama 
much  as  the  art  gallery  stands  in  rela- 
tion to  painting.  Its  aim  is  to  set  off 
drama  in  such  surroundings  and  in  such  light 
as  to  bring  it  within  the  comfortable  vision  and 
agreeable  scrutiny  of  the  nomad  public.  To 
say  that  fine  drama  may  produce  an  equal  ef- 
fect read  as  acted  may  be  true  or  not  as  you 
choose,  but  so  too  a  fine  painting  may  produce 
an  equal  effect  beheld  in  one's  library  as  in 
the  Uffizi.  Art  thrives — art  leads  to  art — on 
sympathy  and  a  measure  of  general  under- 
standing. Otherwise,  of  what  use  criticism? 
To  divorce  the  theatre  from  a  consideration 
of  drama  as  an  art,  to  contend,  as  it  has  been 
contended  from  Aristotle's  day  to  Corneille's, 
and  from  Dryden's  and  Lamb's  to  our  own, 
[63] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
that  "the  more  lasting  and  noble  design"  of 
drama  rests  in  a  reading  rather  than  a  seeing, 
may  be,  strictly,  a  logical  esthetic  manoeuvre, 
but  equally  a  logical  esthetic  manoeuvre 
would  be  a  divorcement  of  canvas  from  paint- 
ing as  an  art.  The  theatre  is  the  canvas  of 
drama.  The  printed  drama  is  like  a  bubbling 
and  sunlit  spring,  encountered  only  by  wan- 
derers into  the  hills  and  awaiting  the  bottling 
process  of  the  theatre  to  carry  its  tonic  waters 
far  and  wide  among  an  expectant  and  emo- 
tionally ill  people. 

The  criticism  that  nominates  itself  to  hold 
drama  and  the  theatre  as  things  apart  is  a 
criticism  which,  for  all  its  probable  integrity 
and  reason,  suffers  from  an  excessive  aristoc- 
racy, like  a  duchess  in  a  play  by  Mr.  Sydney 
Grundy.  Its  aesthetic  nose  is  elevated  to  such 
a  degree  that  it  may  no  longer  serve  as  a  prac- 
tical organ  of  earthly  smell,  but  merely  as  a 
quasi-wax  feature  to  round  out  the  symmetry 
of  the  face.  It  is  criticism  in  a  stiff  corset, 
erect,  immobile,  lordly — like  the  Prussian  lieu- 
tenant of  yesterday,  a  striking  figure,  yet  just 

[64] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
a  little  absurd.  It  is  sound,  but  like  many 
things  that  are  sound  in  aesthetics,  it  has  its 
weak  points,  even  its  confounding  points.  For 
they  say  that  propaganda  can  have  no  place  in 
art,  and  along  comes  a  Hauptmann  and  writes 
a  "Weavers."  Or  they  say  that  art  is  form, 
and  along  comes  a  Ridhard  Strauss  and  com- 
poses two  songs  for  baritone  and  orchestra 
that  set  the  critics  to  a  mad  chasing  of  their 
own  tails.  Or,  opposing  criticism  as  an  art, 
they  say  that  "criticism  is  art  in  form,  but  its 
content  is  judgment,  which  takes  it  out  of  the 
intuitional  world  into  the  conceptual  world" — 
and  along  comes  an  H.  G.  Wells  with  his 
"The  New  MachiavelH"  which,  like  criticism, 
is  art  in  form  and  its  content  judgment.  To 
hold  that  the  drama  as  an  art  may  achieve  its 
highest  end  read  by  the  individual  and  not 
acted  in  the  theatre,  is  to  hold  that  music  as 
an  art  may  achieve  its  highest  end  played  by 
but  one  instrument  and  not  by  an  orchestra. 
The  theatre  is  the  drama's  orchestra :  upon  the 
wood  of  its  boards  and  the  wind  of  its  puppets 
is  the  melody  of  drama  in  all  its  full  richness 
[65] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
sounded.  What  if  drama  is  art  and  the 
theatre  not  art?  What  if  "Hamlet"  is  art 
and  electric  Hghts  and  cheese-cloth  are  not 
art?  Schubert's  piano  trio,  op.  99,  is  art,  and 
a  pianoforte  is  a  mere  wooden  box  containing 
a  number  of  little  hammers  that  hit  an  equal 
number  of  steel  and  copper  wires.  What  if 
I  can  read  a  full  imagination  into  "Romeo  and 
Juliet"  and  thus  people  it  and  make  it  live  for 
me,  without  going  to  the  theati'e?  So,  too, 
can  I  read  a  full  melody  into  the  manuscript  of 
a  song  by  Hugo  Wolf  and  thus  make  it  sing 
for  me,  without  going  to  a  concert  hall.  But 
why?  Is  there  only  one  way  to  appreciate 
and  enjoy  art — and  since  when?  Wagner  on 
a  single  violin  is  Wagner;  Wagner  on  all  the 
orchestra  is  super- Wagner.  To  read  a  great 
drama  is  to  play  "Parsifal"  on  a  cornet  and 
an  oboe. 

The  object  of  the  theatre  is  not,  as  is  habit- 
ually maintained,  a  shrewd  excitation  of  the 
imagination  of  a  crowd,  but  rather  a  shrewd 
relaxation  of  that  imagination.  It  is  a  faulty 
axiom  that  holds  the  greatest  actor   in  the 

[66] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
theatre  to  be  an  audience's  imagination,  and 
the  adroit  cultivation  of  the  latter  to  be  ever 
productive  of  large  financial  return.  As  I 
have  on  more  than  one  occasion  pointed  out 
from  available  and  acutely  relevant  statistics, 
the  more  a  dramatist  relies  upon  the  imagi- 
nation, of  an  audience,  the  less  the  box-office 
reward  that  is  his.  An  audience  fills  a  theatre 
auditorium  not  so  eager  to  perform  with  its 
imagination  as  to  have  its  imagination  per- 
formed upon.  This  is  not  the  paradox  it  may 
superficially  seem  to  be.  The  difference  is 
the  difference  between  a  prompt  commercial 
failure  like  Molnar's  "Der  Gardeofficier" 
("Where  Ignorance  Is  Bliss")  which  asks  an 
audience  to  perform  with  its  imagination  and 
a  great  commercial  success  like  Barrie's 
"Peter  Pan"  whidh  performs  upon  the  audi- 
ence's imagination  by  supplying  to  it  every 
detail  of  imagination,  ready-made  and  persua- 
sively labelled.  The  theatre  is  not  a  place  to 
which  one  goes  in  search  of  the  unexplored 
corners  of  one's  imagination;  it  is  a  place  to 
which  one  goes  in  repeated  search  of  the  fa- 

[67] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
miliar  corners  of  one's  imagination.  The  mo- 
ment the  dramatist  works  in  the  direction  of 
unfamihar  corners,  he  is  lost.  This,  contra- 
dictorily enough,  is  granted  by  the  very  critics 
who  hold  to  the  imagination  fallacy  which  I 
have  just  described.  They  unanimously  agree 
that  a  dramatist's  most  successful  cultivation 
of  an  audience  lies  in  what  they  term,  and 
nicely,  the  mood  of  recognition,  and  in  the 
same  breath  paradoxically  contend  that  sudden 
imaginative  shock  is  a  desideratum  no  less. 

In  this  pleasant  remission  of  the  active  im- 
agination lies  one  of  the  secrets  of  the  charm 
of  the  theatre.  Nor  is  the  theatre  alone  in 
this.  On  even  the  higher  plane  of  the  authen- 
tic arts  a  measure  of  the  same  phenomenon 
assists  in  what  may  perhaps  not  too  far-fetch- 
edly  be  termed  the  negative  stimulation  of  the 
spectator's  fancy.  For  all  the  pretty  and 
winning  words  to  the  contrary,  no  person  ca- 
pable of  sound  introspection  will  admit  that  a 
beautiful  painting  like  Giorgione's  "The  Con- 
cert" or  a  beautiful  piece  of  sculpture  like 
Pisano's  Perugian  fountain  actually  and  liter- 

[68] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
ally  stirs  his  imagination,  and  sets  it  a-sail 
across  hitherto  undiarted  aesthetic  seas.  What 
such  a  painting  or  piece  of  sculpture  does  is  to 
reach  out  and,  with  its  overpowering  beauty, 
encompass  and  aesthetically  fence  in  the  ante- 
cedent wandering  and  uncertain  imagination 
of  its  spectator.  As  in  the  instance  of  drama, 
it  does  not  so  much  awaken  a  dormant  imagi- 
nation as  soothe  an  imagination  already  awake. 
Of  all  the  arts,  music  alone  remains  a  teleg- 
rapher of  unborn  dreams. 

The  theatre  brings  to  the  art  of  drama  con- 
crete movement,  concrete  colour,  and  concrete 
final  effectiveness :  this,  in  all  save  a  few  minor 
particulars.  The  art  of  drama  suffers,  true 
enough,  when  the  theatre,  even  at  its  finest, 
is  challenged  by  it  to  produce  the  values  intrin- 
sic in  its  ghost  of  a  dead  king,  or  in  its  battle 
on  Bosworth  Field,  or  in  its  ship  torn  by  the 
tempest,  or  in  its  fairy  wood  on  midsummer 
night,  or  in  its  approaching  tread  of  doom  of 
the  gods  of  the  mountain.  But  for  each  such 
defeat  it  prospers  doubly  in  the  gifts  that  the 
theatre  brings  to  it.     Such  gifts  as  the  leader 

[69] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Craig  has  brought  to  the  furtherance  of  the 
beauty  of  "Electra"  and  "Hamlet,"  as  Rein- 
hardt  and  his  aides  have  brought  to  "Ariadne" 
and  "JuHus  Caesar,"  as  Golovine  and  Appia 
and  Bakst  and  Linnebach  and  half  a  dozen 
others  have  brought  to  the  classics  that  have 
called  to  them,  are  not  small  ones.     They  have 
crystallized  the  glory  of  drama,  have  taken  so 
many  loose  jewels  and  given  them  substantial 
and  appropriate  settings  which  have  fittingly 
posed  their  radiance.     To  say  that  the  reading 
imagination  of  the  average  cultured  man  is 
superior  in  power  of  suggestion  and  depiction 
to  the  imagination  of  the  theatre  is  idiotically 
to  say  that  the  reading  imagination  of  every 
average  cultured  man  is  superior  in  these  pow- 
ers to  the  combined  theatrical  imaginations  of 
Gordon  Craig,  Max  Reinhardt  and  Eleanora 
Duse  operating  jointly  upon  the  same  play. 
Even  a  commonplace  imagination  can  success- 
fully conjure  up  a  landscape  more  beautiful 
than  any  painted  by  Poussin  or  Gainsborough, 
or  jewels  more  opalescent  than  any  painted  by 
Rembrandt,  or  a  woman's  dress  more  luminous 

[70] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
than  any  painted  by  Fortuny,  or  nymphs 
more  beguiling  than  any  of  Rubens',  yet  who 
so  foolish  to  say — as  they  are  wont  foolishly  to 
say  of  reading  imagination  and  the  drama — 
that  such  an  imagination  is  therefore  superior 
to  that  of  the  artists?  This,,  in  essence,  is 
none  the  less  the  serious  contention  of  those 
who  decline  to  reconcile  themselves  to  the 
theatrically  produced  drama.  This  conten- 
tion, reduced  to  its  skeleton,  is  that,  since  the 
vice-president  of  the  Corn  Exchange  Bank 
can  picture  the  chamber  in  the  outbuilding  ad- 
joining Gloster's  castle  more  greatly  to  his 
satisfaction  than  Adolphe  Appia  can  picture 
it  for  him  on  the  stage,  the  mental  perfor- 
mance of  the  former  is  therefore  a  finer  artis- 
tic achievement  than  the  stage  performance  of 
the  latter. 


II 

The  word  imagination  leads  critics  to  queer 
antics.  It  is,  perhaps,  the  most  manhandled 
word  in  our  critical  vocabulary.     It  is  used 

[71] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
almost  invariably  in  its  literal  meaning:  no 
shades  and  shadows  are  vouchsafed  to  it. 
Imagination,  in  good  truth,  is  not  the  basis  of 
art,  but  an  overtone.  Many  an  inferior  artist 
has  a  greater  imagination  than  many  a  super- 
ior artist.  Maeterlinck's  imagination  is  much 
richer  than  Hauptmann's,  Erik  Satie's  is 
much  richer  than  Cesar  Franck's,  and  I  am 
not  at  all  certain  that  Romain  Holland's  is  not 
twice  as  opulent  as  Thomas  Hardy's.  Imagi- 
nation is  the  slave  of  the  true  artist,  the  master 
of  the  weak.  The  true  artist  beats  imagina- 
tion with  the  cat-o'-nine-tails  of  his  individual 
technic  until  it  cries  out  in  pain,  and  this  pain 
is  the  work  of  art  which  is  born.  The  inferior 
craftsman  comfortably  confounds  imagina- 
tion with  the  finished  work,  and  so  pets  and 
coddles  it;  and  imagination's  resultant  minc- 
ings  and  giggles  he  then  vaingloriously  sets 
forth  as  resolute  art. 

The  theatre  offers  to  supplement,  embroider 
and  enrich  the  imagination  of  the  reader  of 
drama  with  the  imaginations  of  the  actor,  the 
scene  designer,  the  musician,  the  costumer  and 

[72] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
the  producing  director.  Each  of  these,  before 
he  sets  himself  to  his  concrete  task,  has — like 
the  lay  reader — sought  the  fruits  of  his  own 
reading  imagination.  The  fruits  of  these  five 
!reading  imaginations  are  then  assembled, 
carefully  assorted,  and  the  most  worthy  of 
them  deftly  burbanked.  The  final  staging  of 
the  drama  is  merely  a  staging  of  these  best 
fruits  of  the  various  reading  imaginations. 
To  say,  against  this,  that  it  is  most  often  im- 
possible to  render  a  reading  imagination  into 
satisfactory  concrete  forms  is  doubtless  to  say 
what  is,  strictly,  true.  But  art  itself  is  at  its 
highest  merely  an  approach  toward  limitless 
imagination  and  beauty.  ^Esthetics  is  a  pil- 
grim on  the  road  to  a  Mecca  that  is  ever  just 
over  the  sky-line.  Of  how  many  great  works 
of  art  can  one  say,  with  complete  and  final 
conviction,  that  art  in  this  particular  direc- 
tion can  conceivably  go  no  farther?  Is  it  not 
conceivable  that  some  super-]Michelangelo 
will  some  day  fashion  an  even  more  perfect 
"Slave,"  and  some  super-Shakespeare  an  even 
more  beautiful  poetic  drama? 

[73] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
The  detractors  of  the  theatre  are  often  ex- 
pert in  persuasive  half-truths  and  masters  of 
dialectic  sleight-of-hand.  Their  perform- 
ances are  often  so  adroit  that  the  spectator  is 
quick  to  believe  that  the  trunk  is  really  empty, 
yet  the  false  bottom  is  there  for  all  its  cunning 
concealment.  Take,  for  example,  George 
Moore,  in  the  preface  to  his  last  play,  "The 
Coming  of  Gabrielle."  "The  illusion  created 
by  externals,  scenes,  costumes,  lighting  and 
short  sentences  is  in  itself  illusory,"  he  pro- 
fesses to  believe,  though  why  he  numbers  the 
dramatist *s  short  sentences  among  the  exter- 
nals of  the  stage  is  not  quite  clear.  "The  best 
performances  of  plays  and  operas  are  wit- 
nessed at  rehearslals.  Jean  de  Reszke  :was 
never  so  like  Tristan  at  night  as  he  was  in  the 
afternoon  when  he  sang  the  part  in  a  short 
jacket,  a  bowler  hat  and  an  umbrella  in  his 
hand.  The  chain  armour  and  the  plumes  that 
he  wore  at  night  were  but  a  distraction,  setting 
our  thoughts  on  periods,  on  the  short  swords 
in  use  in  the  ninth  century  in  Ireland  or  in 
Cornwall,  on  the  comfort  or  the  discomfort  of 

[74] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
the  ships  in  which  the  lovers  were  voyaging, 
on  the  absui'd  night-dress  which  is  the  conven- 
tion that  Isolde  should  appear  in,  a  garment 
sihe  never  wore  and  which  we  know  to  be  make- 
believe.  But  the  hat  and  feathers  that  Isolde 
appears  in  when  she  rehearses  the  part  are 
forgotten  the  moment  she  sings;  and  if  I  had 
to  choose  to  see  Forbes-Robertson  play  Ham- 
let or  rehearse  Hamlet,  I  should  not  hesitate 
for  a  moment.  The  moment  he  speaks  he 
ceases  to  be  a  modern  man,  but  in  black  hose 
the  illusion  ceases,  for  we  forget  the  Prince 
of\  (Denmiark  and  remember  the  piummer." 
Years  ago,  in  a  volimie  of  critical  essays  given 
the  title  "Another  Book  on  the  Theatre,"  I 
took  a  boyish  delight  in  setting  off  precisely 
the  same  noisy  firework  just  to  hear  the  folks 
in  the  piazza  rocking-chairs  let  out  a  yell. 
These  half-truths  serve  criticism  as  sauce 
serves  asparagus:  they  give  tang  to  what  is 
otherwise  often  tasteless  food.  This  is  partic- 
ularly true  with  criticism  at  its  most  geomet- 
rical and  profound,  since  such  criticism,  save 
in  rare  instances,  is  not  especially  lively  read- 
[75] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
ing.  But,  nevertheless,  the  sauce  is  not  the 
asparagus.  And  wthen  Mr.  Moore  (doubt- 
less with  his  tongue  in  his  cheek )  observes  that 
he  can  much  more  readily  imagine  the  lusty 
Frau  Tillie  Pfirsich-Melba  as  Isolde  in  a  pink 
and  green  ostrich  feather  hat  confected  in 
some  Friedrichstrasse  ateher  than  in  the  cus- 
tomary stage  trappings,  he  allows,  by  implica- 
tion, that  he  might  even  more  readily  imagine 
the  elephantine  lady  as  the  seductive  Carmen 
if  she  had  no  clothes  on  at  all. 

This  is  the  trouble  with  paradoxes.  It  is 
not  that  they  prove  too  little,  as  is  believed 
of  them,  but  that  they  prove  altogether  too 
much.  If  the  illusion  created  by  stage  exter- 
nals is  in  itself  illusory,  as  Mr.  Moore  says,  the 
complete  deletion  of  all  such  stage  externals 
should  be  the  best  means  for  providing  abso- 
lute illusion.  Yet  the  complete  absence  of  il- 
lusion where  this  is  the  case  is  all  too  familiar 
to  any  of  us  who  have  looked  on  such  specta- 
cles as  "The  Bath  of  Phryne"  and  the  like  in 
the  theatres  of  Paris.  A  prodigality  of  stage 
externals   does   not  contribute   to  disillusion, 

[76] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
but  to  illusion.  These  externals  have  become, 
through  protracted  usage,  so  familiar  that 
they  are,  so  to  speak,  scarcely  seen:  they  are 
taken  by  the  eye  for  granted.  By  way  of 
proof,  one  need  only  consider  two  types  of 
Shakespearian  production,  one  lijke  that  pf 
Mr.  Robert  Mantell  and  one  like  that  lately 
employed  for  "Macbeth"  by  Mr.  Arthur 
Hopkins.  Where  the  overladen  stereotyped 
first  production  paradoxically  fades  out  of  the 
picture  for  the  spectator  and  leaves  the  path 
of  illusion  clear  for  him,  the  superlatively 
simple  second  production,  almost  wholly 
bereft  of  familiar  externals,  arrests  and  fixes 
his  attention  and  makes  illusion  impossible. 
It  is  true,  bf  course,  that  all  this  may  be 
changed  in  time,  when  the  deletion  of  exter- 
nals by  the  new  stagecraft  shall  have  become 
a  convention  of  the  theatre  as  the  heavy  lay- 
ing-on  of  externals  is  a  convention  at  present. 
But,  as  things  are  today,  these  externals  are, 
negatively,  the  most  positive  contributors  to 
illusion. 

It  is  the  misfortune   of  the  theatre  that 
[77] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
critics  have  almost  always  approached  it,  and 
entered  it,  with  a  defiant  and  challenging  air. 
I  have,  during  the  eighteen  years  of  my  active 
critical  service,  met  with  and  come  to  know  at 
least  fifty  professional  critics  in  America,  in 
England  and  on  the  Continent,  and  among  all 
this  number  there  have  been  but  four  who  have 
approached  the  theatre  enthusiastically  prej- 
udiced in  its  favour — two  of  them  asses. 
But  between  the  one  large  group  that  has  been 
critically  hostile  and  the  other  smaller  group 
that  has  been  uncritically  effervescent,  I  have 
encountered  no  sign  of  calm  and  reasoned 
compromise,  no  sign  of  frank  and  intelligent 
willingness  to  regard  eadh  and  every  theatre 
as  a  unit,  and  so  to  be  appraised,  instead  of 
lumping  together  good  and  bad  theatres  alike 
and  labelling  the  heterogeneous  mass  "the 
theatre."  There  is  no  such  thing  as  "the 
theatre."  There  is  this  theatre,  that  theatre, 
and  still  that  other  theatre.  Each  is  a  unit. 
To  talk  of  "the  theatre"  is  to  talk  of  the  Greek 
theatre,  the  Elizabethan  theatre  and  the  mod- 
ern theatre  in  one  breath,  or  to  speak  simul- 

[78] 


The  Place  of  the  Theatre 
taneously  of  the  Grosses  Schauspielhaus  of 
Max  Reinhardt  and  the  Eltinge  Theatre  of 
Mr.  A.  H.  Woods.  "The  theatre,"  of  course, 
has  certain  more  or  less  minor  constant  and 
enduring  conventions — at  least,  so  it  seems  as 
far  as  we  now  can  tell — but  so,  too,  has  chirog- 
raphy,  yet  we  do  not  speak  of  "the  chirogra- 
phy."  There  are  some  theatres — I  use  the 
word  in  its  proper  restricted  sense — that 
glorify  drama  and  enhance  its  beauty;  there 
are  others  that  vitiate  drama.  But  so  also  are 
there  some  men  who  write  fine  drama,  and 
others  who  debase  drama  to  mere  fodder  for 
witlings.  .  .  .  The  Shakespeare  of  the  theatre 
of  Gordon  Craig  is  vivid  and  brilliant  beauty. 
Call  it  art  or  not  art  as  you  will — what  does  a 
label  matter?  The  Moliere  of  the  theatre  of 
Alexander  Golovine  is  suggestive  and  exqui- 
site enchantment.  Call  it  art  or  not  art  as 
you  will — what  does  a  label  matter?  The 
Wagner  of  the  opera  house  of  Ludwig  Sievert 
is  triumphant  and  rapturous  splendour.  Call 
it  anything  you  like — and  again,  what  does  a 
label  matter?  There  are  too  many  labels  in 
the  world. 

[79] 


IV.      THE    PLACE    OF   ACTING 


IV.     THE  PLACE  OF  ACTING 


WHEN  Mr.  Nathan  says  that  acting 
is  not  an  art,  of  course  he  is  talking 
arrant  rot — who  could  doubt  it, 
after  witnessing  a  performance  by  the  great 
Duse?"  So,  the  estimable  actor,  Mr.  Arnold 
Daly.  Whether  acting  is  or  is  not  an  art,  it 
is  not  my  concern  at  the  moment  to  consider, 
yet  I  quote  the  riposte  of  Mr.  Daly  as  perhaps 
typical  of  those  who  set  themselves  as  defen- 
ders of  the  yea  theory.  It  seems  to  me  that 
if  this  is  a  satisfactory  toucJie  no  less  satisfac- 
tory should  be  some  such  like  rejoinder  as: 
"When  Mr.  Nathan  says  that  acting  is  an  art, 
of  course  he  is  talking  arrant  rot — wiho  could 
doubt  it,  after  witnessing  a  performance  by 
Mr.  Corse  Payton." 

If  an  authentic  art  is  anything  which  may 
properly  be  founded  upon  an  exceptionally 
[83] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
brilliant  performance,  then,  by  virtue  of  the 
Reverend  Doctor  Ernest  M.  Stires'  brilliant 
performance  in  it,  is  pulpiteering  an  art,  and, 
on  the  strength  of  Miss  Bird  Millman's  bril- 
liant performance  in  it,  is  tight-rope  walking 
an  art  no  less.  Superficially  a  mere  dialectic 
monkey-trick,  this  is  yet  perhaps  not  so  absurd 
as  it  may  seem,  for  if  Duse's  art  lies  in  the 
fact  that  she  breathes  life  and  dynamic  effect 
into  the  written  woxd  of  the  artist  D'An- 
nunzio,  Stires'  lies  in  the  more  substantial  fact 
that  he  breathes  life  and  dynamic  effect  into 
the  word  of  the  somewhat  greater,  and  more 
evasive  artist,  God.  And  Miss  Millman,  too, 
brings  to  her  quasi-art,  movement,  colour, 
rhythm,  beauty  and — one  may  even  say — a 
sense  of  fantastic  character,  since  the  effect 
she  contrives  is  less  that  of  a  dumpy  little 
woman  in  a  short  wihite  skirt  pirouetting  on  a 
taut  wire  than  of  an  unreal  creature,  half  bird, 
half  woman,  out  of  some  forgotten  fable. 

The  circumstance  that  Duse  is  an  artist 
who  happens  to  be  an  actress  does  not  make 
acting  an  art  any  more  than  the  circumstance 

[84] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
that  Villon  was  an  artist  who  happened  to  be 
a  burglar  or  that  Paderewski  is  an  artist  who 
happens  to  be  a  politician  makes  burglary  and 
politics  arts.  Duse  is  an  artist  first,  and  an 
actress  second:  one  need  only  look  into  her 
very  great  share  in  the  creation  of  the  dramas 
bearing  the  name  of  D'Annunzio  to  reconcile 
one's  self — if  not  too  stubborn,  at  least  in  part 
— to  this  point  of  view.  So,  also,  were 
Clairon,  Rachel  and  Jane  Hading  artists 
apart  from  histrionism,  and  so  too,  is  Sarah 
Bernhardt:  who  can  fail  to  detect  the  creative 
artist  in  the  "Memoires"  of  the  first  named,  for 
instance,  or,  in  the  case  of  the  last  named,  in 
the  fertile  impulses  of  her  essays  in  sculpture, 
painting  and  dramatic  literature?  It  is  a  cur- 
ious thing  that,  in  all  the  pronouncements  of 
acting  as  an  art,  the  names  chosen  by  the  advo- 
cates as  representative  carriers  of  the  aesthetic 
banner  are  those  of  actors  and  actresses  who 
have  most  often  offered  evidence  of  artistic 
passion  in  fields  separate  and  apart  from  their 
histrionic  endeavours.  Lemaitre,  Salvini, 
Rachel,  Talma,  Coquelin,  Betterton,  Garrick, 

[85] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Fanny  Kemble,  the  Bancrofts,  Irving,  Tree, 
and  on  down — far  down — the  line  to  Ditrich- 
stein,  Sothern,  Marie  Tempest,  Guitry, 
Gemier  and  the  brothers  Barrymore — all  give 
testimony,  in  writing,  painting,  musicianship, 
poetry  and  dramatic  authorship  to  aesthetic 
impulses  other  than  acting.  Since  acting 
itself  as  an  art  is  open  to  question,  the  merit  or 
demerit  of  the  performances  produced  from 
the  aesthetic  impulses  in  point  is  not  an  issue: 
the  fact  seems  to  be  that  it  has  been  the  artist 
who  has  become  the  actor  rather  than  the  actor 
who  has  become  the  artist. 

The  actor,  as  I  have  on  another  occasion 
hazarded,  is  the  dhild  of  the  miscegenation  of 
an  art  and  a  trade:  of  the  drama  and  the 
theatre.  Since  acting  must  appeal  to  the 
many — this  is  obviously  its  only  reason  for  be- 
ing, for  acting  is  primarily  a  filter  through 
which  drama  may  be  lucidly  distilled  for 
heterogeneous  theatre-goers — it  must,  logi- 
cally, be  popular  or  perish.  Surely  no  au- 
thentic art  can  rest  or  thrive  upon  such  a  pre- 
mise.    The  great  actors  and  actresses,  unlike 

[86] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
great  fashioners  in  other  arts,  have  invariably 
been  favourites  of  the  crowd,  and  it  is  doubt- 
less a  too  charitable  hypothesis  to  assume  that 
this  crowd  has  ever  been  gifted  with  critical 
insight  beyond  cavil.  If,  therefore,  the  actor 
or  actress  who  can  sway  great  crowds  is 
strictly  to  be  termed  an  artist,  why  may  we  not 
also,  by  strict  definition,  similarly  term  as  ex- 
ponents of  an  authentic  art  others  who  can 
likewise  sway  the  same  crowds:  a  great  politi- 
cian hke  Roosevelt,  say,  or  a  great  lecturer 
like  Ingersoll,  or  a  successful  practical  theo- 
logian like  Billy  Sunday?  (Let  us  send  out 
these  paradox  shock-troops  to  clear  the  way 
for  the  more  sober  infantry.) 

I  have  said  that  I  have  no  intention  to  argue 
for  or  against  acting  as  an  art  yet,  for  all  the 
circumstance  that  the  case  for  the  prosecution 
has  long  seemed  the  soundest  and  the  most 
eloquent,  there  are  still  sporadic  instances  of 
imaginative  histrionism  that  give  one  reason  to 
ponder.  But,  pondering,  it  has  subsequently 
come  to  the  more  penetrating  critic  that  what 
has  on  sudh  occasions  passed  for  an  art  has  in 

[87] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
reality  been  merely  a  reflected  art:  the  art  of 
drama  interpreted  not  with  the  imagination 
of  the  actor  but,  more  precisely,  with  the  ima- 
gi7iation  of  the  dramatist.  In  other  words, 
that  actor  or  actress  is  the  most  competent  and 
effective  whose  imagination  is  successful  in 
meeting  literally,  and  translating,  the  imagi- 
nation of  the  dramatist  which  has  created  the 
role  played  by  the  particular  actor  or  actress. 
To  name  the  actor's  imagination  in  such  a  case 
a  creative  imagination  is  a  rather  wistful  pro- 
cedure, for  it  does  not  create  but  merely  duph- 
cates.  Surely  no  advocate  of  acting  as  a  crea- 
tive art  would  be  so  bold  as  to  contend  that 
any  actor,  however  great,  has  ever  brought 
creative  imagination  to  the  already  full  and 
superb  creative  imagination  of  Shakespeare. 
This  would  be,  on  an  actor's  part,  the  sheerest 
impudence.  The  greatest  actor  is  simply  he 
who  is  best  fitted  by  figure,  voice,  training 
and  intelligence  not  to  invade  and  annul  the 
power  of  the  role  which  a  great  dramatist  has 
imagined  and  created.  Duse  and  D'Annun- 
zio  were,  so  to  speak,  spiritually  and  physi- 

[88] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
cally  one:  hence  the  unmatched  perfection  of 
the  former's  histrionism  in  the  latter's  roles. 
To  see  Duse  is,  save  one  admit  one's  self 
critically  to  the  facts,  therefore  to  suffer  theo- 
retical art  doubts  and  the  convictions  of  such 
as  Mr.  Daly. 

It  is,  of  course,  the  common  habit  of  the 
prejudiced  critic  to  overlook,  in  the  estimate 
of  acting  as  an  art,  the  few  admirable  expo- 
nents of  acting  and  to  take  into  convenient 
consideration  only  the  enormous  majority  of 
incompetents.  But  to  argue  that  acting  is 
not  an  art  simply  because  a  thousand  Edmund 
Breeses  and  Miss  Adele  Bloods  give  no  evi- 
dence that  it  is  an  art  is  to  argue  that  sculp- 
ture is  not  an  art  simply  because  a  thousand 
fashioners  of  Kewpies  and  plaster  of  Paris 
busts  of  Charlie  Chaplin  and  Mr.  Harding 
give  no  evidence  in  a  like  direction.  Yet  the 
circumstance  that  there  are  admittedly  excel- 
lent actors  as  well  as  bad  actors  establishes  act- 
ing as  an  art  no  more  than  the  circumstance 
that  there  are  admittedly  excellent  cuckoo- 
whistlers  as  well  as  bad  cuckoo-whistlers  es- 

[89] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
tablishes  the  playing  of  the  cuckoo-whistle  as 
an  art.  If  I  seem  to  reduce  the  comparison 
to  what  appears  to  be  an  absurdity,  it  is  be- 
cause by  such  absurdities,  or  elementals,  is  the 
status  of  acting  in  the  field  of  the  arts  most 
sharply  to  be  perceived.  For  if  Bernhardt's 
ever-haunting  cry  of  the  heart  in  "Izeyl"  is  a 
peg,  however  slight,  upon  which  may  be  hung 
a  strand  of  the  theory  that  maintains  acting  as 
an  art,  so  too,  by  the  strict  canon  of  dialectics, 
is  Mr.  Ruben  Katz's  ever-haunting  cry  of  the 
cuckoo  in  the  coda  of  the  slow  movement  of 
Beethoven's  Pastoral  Symphony. 

If  acting  is  an  art,  the  proofs  thus  far 
offered  are  not  only  unconvincing  but  fund- 
amentally, on  the  score  of  logic,  not  a  little 
droll.  Let  us  view  a  few  illustrations.  If 
criticism  is  an  art  (thus  a  familiar  contention) , 
why  is  not  acting  also  an  art,  since  both  are 
concerned  with  re-creating  works  of  art?  But 
the  artist's  work  offered  up  to  the  critic  is  a 
challenge,  whereas  the  dramatist's  work 
offered  up  to  the  actor  is  a  consonance.  Crit- 
icism is  war,   whether   in  behalf  of  aesthetic 

[90] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
friend  or  against  aesthetic  foe ;  acting  is  agree- 
ment, peace.  The  critic  re-creates,  in  terms 
of  his  own  personahty,  the  work  of  another 
and  often  emphatically  different  and  antago- 
nistic personality.  The  actor  re-creates,  in 
terms  of  a  dramatist's  concordantly  imagined 
personality,  his  own  personality:  the  result 
is  less  re-creation  than  non-re-creation.  In 
other  words,  the  less  the  actor  creates  or  re- 
creates and  the  more  he  remains  simply  an 
adaptable  tool  in  the  hands  of  the  dramatist, 
the  better  actor  he  is.  The  actor's  state  is 
thus  what  may  be  termed  one  of  active  impas- 
sivity. Originality  and  independence,  save 
within  the  narrowest  of  limits,  are  denied  him. 
He  is  a  literal  translator  of  a  work  of  art,  not 
an  independently  imaginative  and  speculative 
interpreter,  as  the  critic  is.  The  dramatist's 
work  of  art  does  not  say  to  him,  as  to  the  critic, 
"Here  I  am!  What  do  you,  out  of  all  your 
experience,  taste  and  training,  think  of  me?" 
It  says  to  him,  instead  and  peremptorily, 
"Here  I  am!  Think  of  me  exactly  as  I  am, 
and  adapt  all  of  your  experience,  taste  and 

[91] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
training  to  the  interpretation  of  me  exactly  as 
I  am!" 

Brushing  aside  the  theory  that  the  true 
artist  is  the  actor  who  can  transform  his  voice, 
his  manner,  his  character;  who  will  disappear 
behind  his  part  instead  of  imposing  himself 
on  it  and  adding  himself  to  it — a  simple  feat, 
since  by  such  a  definition  the  Messrs.  Fregoli 
and  Henri  De  Vries,  amazing  vaudeville  pro- 
tean actors,  are  true  histrionic  artists — Mr. 
Walkley,  in  his  essay  on  "The  English  Actor 
of  Today,"  bravely  takes  up  the  defence  from 
what  he  regards  as  a  more  difficult  approach. 
"In  the  art  of  acting  as  in  any  other  art,"  he 
says,  "the  first  requisite  is  life.  The  actor's 
part  is  a  series  of  speeches  and  stage  directions, 
mere  cold  print,  an  inert  mass  that  has  to  be 
raised  somehow  from  the  dead.  If  the  actor 
disappears  behind  it,  there  is  nothing  left  but 
a  Golgotha."  Here  is  indeed  gay  news! 
Hamlet,  lago,  Romeo,  Shylock — mere  "cold 
print,"  inert  Shakespearian  masses  that,  in 
order  to  live,  have  to  be  raised  somehow  from 
the  dead  by  members  of  the  Lambs'  Club !     It 

[92] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
is  only  fair  to  add  that  Mr.  Walkley  quickly 
takes  to  cover  after  launching  this  torpedo, 
and  devotes  the  balance  of  his  interesting  com- 
ments to  a  prudent  and  circumspect  pas  seul 
on  the  very  middle  of  the  controversial  teeter- 
tawter.  For  no  sooner  has  he  described  the 
majestic  drama  of  Shakespeare  as  "mere  cold 
print,  an  inert  mass  that  has  to  be  raised  some- 
how from  the  dead,"  than  he  seems  suddenly, 
and  not  without  a  touch  of  horror,  to  realize 
that  he  has  ridiculously  made  of  Shakespeare  a 
mere  blank  canvas  and  pot  of  paint  for  the  use 
of  this  or  that  actor  whom  he  has  named,  by 
implication  and  with  magnificent  liberalness, 
a  Raphael,  or  a  mere  slab  of  cold  marble  for 
the  sculpturing  skill  of  some  socked  and  bus- 
kined  Mercie. 

II 

Modern  evaluation  of  acting  as  an  unques- 
tionable art  takes  its  key  from  Remond  de 
Sainte-Albine,  the  girhshly  ebullient  French- 
man whose  pragmatic  critical  credo  was,  "If 
it  makes  me  feel,  it  is  art."  While  it  may  be 
reasonable  that  a  purely  emotional  art  may 

[93] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
aptly  be  criticized  according  to  the  degree  of 
emotional  reaction  which  it  induces,  it  is  the 
quality  of  emotion  resident  in  the  critic  that 
offers  that  reasonableness  a  considerable  con- 
fusion. A  perfectly  attuned  and  sound  emo- 
tional equipment — an  emotional  equipment  of 
absolute  pitch,  so  to  speak — is  a  rare  thing, 
even  among  critics  of  brilliant  intelligence, 
taste,  imagination  and  experience.  Goethe, 
Carlyle,  Hazlitt,  Dryden,  Lessing,  to  mention 
only  five,  were  physio-psychological  units  of 
dubious  emotional  structure,  if  we  may  trust 
the  intimate  chronicles.  Thus,  where  much  of 
their  critical  dramatic  writing  may  be  accepted 
without  qualm,  a  distinct  measure  of  distrust 
would  attach  itself  to  any  critical  estimate  of 
acting  which  they  might  have  written  or  act- 
ually did  write. 

There  are,  obviously,  more  or  less  definite 
standards  whereby  we  may  estimate  critical 
writings  of  such  men  as  these  so  far  as  those 
criticisms  deal  with  what  we  may  roughly  de- 
scribe as  the  cerebral  or  semi-cerebral  arts,  but 
there  are  no  standards,  even  remotely  deter- 
minable or  exact,  whereby  we  may  appraise 

[94] 


'  The  Place  of  Acting 

such  of  their  criticisms  as  deal  with  the  directly 
and  wholly  emotional  art  of  acting.  It  is  per- 
haps not  too  far  a  cry  to  assume  that  had  Mr. 
William  Archer's  father  been  murdered 
shortly  before  Mr.  Archer  witnessed  Mr. 
Forbes-Robertson's  Hamlet,  Mr.  Archer 
would  have  been  moved  to  believe  Mr.  Forbes- 
Robertson  on  even  greater  actor-artist  than  he 
believed  him  under  the  existing  circumstances, 
or  that  had  Mr.  Otto  Borchsenius,  the  Danish 
journalist-critic,  regrettably  found  himself  a 
victim  of  syphilis  when  he  reviewed  August 
Lindberg's  "Oswald,"  he  would  have  looked 
on  the  estimable  Lindberg  as  a  doubly  impres- 
sive exponent  of  histrionism.  Nothing  is  more 
aesthetically  and  artistically  dubious  and  in- 
secure than  the  appraisal  of  acting,  for  it  is 
based  upon  the  quicksands  of  varying  human 
emotionalism,  and  of  aural  and  visual  preju- 
dice. Were  I,  for  example,  one  hundred  times 
more  proficient  a  critic  of  drama  and  life  than 
I  am,  my  criticism  of  acting  would  none  the 
less  remain  often  arbitrary  and  erratic,  for  I 
would  remain  constitutionally  anaesthetic  to  a 
Juliet,  however  otherwise  talented,  who  had 
[95] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
piano  legs,  or  to  a  Marc  Antony  who,  for  all 
his  histrionic  power,  presented  to  the  vision  a 
pair  of  knock-knees.  This,  I  well  appreciate, 
is  the  kind  of  critical  writing  that  is  promptly 
set  down  as  flippant,  yet  it  is  the  truth  so  far  as 
I  am  concerned  and  I  daresay  that  it  is,  in  one 
direction  or  another,  the  truth  so  far  as  the 
majority  of  critics  are  concerned. 

The  most  that  may  be  said  of  the  soundness 
of  this  or  that  laudatory  criticism  of  an  actor's 
performance  is  that  the  performance  in  point 
has  met  exactly — or  very  nearly — the  particu- 
lar critic's  personal  notion  of  how  he,  as  a 
human  being,  would  have  cried,  laughed  and 
otherwise  comported  himself  were  he  an  actor 
and  were  he  in  the  actor's  role.  The  opposite, 
or  denunciatory,  phase  of  such  criticism  holds 
a  similar  truth.  If  this  is  not  true,  by  w^hat 
standards  can  the  critic  estimate  the  actor's 
performance  ?  By  the  standards  of  the  actors 
who  have  preceded  this  actor  in  the  playing 
of  the  role,  you  say?  What  if  the  role  is  a 
new  one,  a  peculiar  and  novel  one,  that  has 
not  been  played  before?     Again,  you  say  that 

[96] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
the  role  may  be  in  an  alien  drama  and  that 
the  actor  may  be  an  alien,  both  role  and 
performance  being  foreign  to  the  emotional 
equipment  of  the  critic.  But  basic  emo- 
tions, the  foundation  of  drama,  are  universal. 
Still  again,  what  of  such  dramas  as  "(Edipus 
Rex,"  what  of  such  roles — this  with  a  trium- 
phant chuckle  on  yom'  part?  I  return  the 
chuckle,  and  bid  you  read  the  criticisms  that 
have  been  written  of  the  actors  who  have 
played  in  these  roles!  Invariably  the  actors 
have  been  treated  in  precisely  the  same  terms 
and  by  the  same  standards  as  if  they  were 
playing,  not  in  the  drama  of  the  fifth  century 
before  Christ,  but  in  "Fedora,"  "The  Face  in 
the  Moonlight"  or  "The  Count  of  Monte 
Cristo." 

One  cannot  imagine  sound  criticism  apply- 
ing to  any  authentic  art  the  standard  of  actor 
criticism  that  I  have  noted.  Criticism,  true 
enough,  is  always  more  or  less  personal,  but, 
in  its  operation  upon  the  authentic  arts,  its 
personality  is  ever  like  a  new  bottle  into  which 
the   vintage   wine   of   art   has   been   poured. 

[97] 


Tlie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Criticism  of  the  authentic  arts  is  the  result  of 
the  impact  of  a  particular  art  upon  a  particu- 
lar critical  personality.  Criticism  of  the  dubi- 
ous art  of  acting  is  the  result  of  the  impact  of 
a  particular  critical  personahty  upon  this  or 
that  instance  of  acting.  But  if  this  is  even  re- 
motely true,  you  inquire  ironically,  what  of 
such  an  excellent  instance  of  acting  as  Mimi 
Aguglia's  "Salome";  how  in  God's  name  may 
the  critic  appraise  that  performance  in  the 
manner  set  down,  i.  e.,  in  terms  of  himself 
were  he  a  stage  performer?  Well,  for  all  the 
surface  humours  of  the  question,  that  is  act- 
ually more  or  less  the  way  in  which  he  does 
appraise  it.  The  actor  or  actress,  unhke  the 
artist  in  more  authentic  fields,  may  never  in- 
terpret emotion  in  a  manner  unfamilar  to  the 
critic:  the  interpretation  must  be  a  reflection, 
more  or  less  stereotyped,  of  the  critic's  reper- 
toire of  emotions.  Thus,  where  art  is  original 
expression,  acting  is  merely  the  audible  ex- 
pression of  a  silent  expression.  In  another 
phrase,  expression  in  acting  is  predicated 
upon,  and  limited  by,  the  expression  of  the 

[98] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
critic.  It  is,  therefore,  a  mere  duplication  of 
expression.  And  what  holds  true  in  the  case 
of  the  critic  so  far  as  acting  is  concerned  ob- 
viously holds  doubly  true  in  the  case  of  the  un- 
critical public. 

Re-reading  the  celebrated  critiques  of  act- 
ing, I  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  word 
"art"  has  almost  uniformly  been  applied  to 
acting  by  critics  who,  thinking  that  they  had 
pei^haps  belaboured  the  subject  a  trifle  too 
severely,  were  disposed  graciously  to  throw  it 
a  sop.  As  good  an  illustration  as  any  may  be 
had  from  Lewes,  certainly  a  friend  of  acting 
if  ever  there  was  one.     Thus  Lewes: 

"The  truth  is,  we  exaggerate  the  talent  of  an 
actor  because  we  judge  only  from  the  effect  he 
produces,  without  inquiring  too  curiously  into  the 
means.  But,  while  the  painter  has  nothing  but  his 
canvas  and  the  author  has  nothing  but  white  paper 
and  printers'  ink  with  which  to  produce  his  effects, 
the  actor  has  all  other  arts  as  handmaids ;  the 
poet  labours  for  him,  creates  his  part,  gives  him 
his  eloquence,  his  music,  his  imagery,  his  tenderness, 
his  pathos,  his  sublimity ;  the  scene-painter  aids 
him;  the  costumes,  the  lights,  the  music,  all  the 
[99] 


Tlie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
fascination  of  the  stage — all  subserve  the  actor's 
effects ;  these  raise  him  upon  a  pedestal ;  remove 
them,  and  what  is  he?  He  who  can  make  a  stage 
mob  bend  and  sway  with  his  eloquence,  what  could 
he  do  with  a  real  mob,  no  poet  by  to  prompt 
him?  He  who  can  charm  us  with  the  stateliest 
imagery  of  a  noble  mind,  when  robed  in  the  sables 
of  Hamlet,  or  in  the  toga  of  Coriolanus,  what  can 
he  do  in  coat  and  trousers  on  the  world's  stage? 
Rub  off  the  paint,  and  the  eyes  are  no  longer 
brilliant !  Reduce  the  actor  to  his  intrinsic  value, 
and  then  weigh  him  with  the  rivals  whom  he  sur- 
passes in  reputation  and  fortune.  ...  If  my 
estimate  of  the  intrinsic  value  of  acting  is  lower 
than  seems  generally  current,  it  is  from  no  desire 
to  disparage  an  art  I  have  always  loved;  but, 
etc.,  etc." 

You  will  find  the  same  dido  in  most  of  the 
essays  on  acting:  a  protracted  series  of  cuffs 
and  slaps  terminating  in  a  gentle  non-sequi- 
tur  kiss. 

Acting  at  its  finest  is,  however,  often  a  con- 
fusing hypnosis;  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at 
that,  fresh  from  its  spell,  the  critic  has  mis- 
taken it  for  a  more  exalted  something  than  it 
intrinsically  is.  The  flame  and  fire  of  a  Duse, 
[100] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
the  haunt  and  magic  of  a  Bernhardt,  the  pow- 
erful stage  sense  of  creation  of  a  Moissi — 
these  are  not  a  Httle  befuddling.  And,  under 
their  serpent-like  charm,  it  is  not  incompre- 
hensible that  the  critic  should  confound  effect 
and  cause.  Yet  acting,  even  of  the  highest 
order,  is  intrinsically  akin  to  the  legerdemain 
of  a  Hermann  or  a  Kellar  with  a  Shakespeare 
or  a  JMoliere  as  an  assistant  to  hand  over,  as 
the  moment  bids,  the  necessary  pack  of  cards 
or  bowl  of  goldfish.  It  is  trickery  raised  to  its 
most  exalted  level:  a  combination  of  experi- 
ence, intelligence  and  great  charm,  not  reviv- 
ifying something  cold  and  dead,  but  releas- 
ing something  quick  and  alive  from  the  prison 
of  the  printed  page. 

The  actor  who  contends  in  favour  of  his 
creative  art  that  he  must  experience  within 
him  the  feeling  of  the  dramatist,  that  he  must 
actually  persuade  himself  to  feel  his  role  with 
all  its  tm'ning  smiles  and  tears,  speaks  non- 
sense. So,  too,  must  the  auditor,  yet  who 
would  term  the  auditor  a  creative  artist?  The 
actor  who  contends  in  favour  of  his  creative 
[101] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
art  the  exact  opposite,  that  he  is,  to  wit,  a 
creative  artist  since  he  must  theatrically  create 
the  dramatist's  moods,  illusions  and  emotions 
without  feeling  them  himself,  also  speaks  non- 
sense. For  so,  too,  in  such  a  case  as  "Elec- 
tra,"  or  "Ghosts,"  or  "No  More  Blondes," 
must  the  auditor,  yet  who,  again,  would  term 
the  latter  a  creative  artist?  The  actor  who 
contends  in  favour  of  his  creative  art  that  two 
accomplished  actors  often  "create"  the  same 
role  in  an  entirely  different  manner,  speaks 
nonsense  yet  again.  For  what  is  not  creation 
in  the  first  place  does  not  become  creation 
merely  because  it  is  multiplied  by  two.  The 
actor  who  further  contends  in  behalf  of  his 
creative  art  that  if  effective  acting  were  the 
mere  trickery  that  some  maintain  it  to  be,  any 
person  ordinarily  gifted  should  be  able,  after 
a  little  experiment,  to  give  an  effective  stage 
performance,  speaks  truer  than  he  knows. 
Some  of  the  most  remarkable  performances 
on  the  stage  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  of  Dublin 
have  been  given  by  just  such  persons.  And 
[102] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
there  are  numerous  other  instances.  If  act- 
ing is  an  art — and  I  do  not  say  that  it  may 
not  be — it  at  least,  as  an  art,  ill  bears  cross- 
examination  of  even  the  most  superficial  na- 
ture. 


Ill 

Acting  is  perhaps  less  an  art  than  the  decep- 
tive echo  of  an  art.  It  is  drama's  exalted 
halloo  come  back  to  drama  from  the  walls  of 
the  surrounding  amphitheatre.  Criticism  of 
acting  too  often  mistakes  the  echo  for  the 
original  voice.  Although  the  analogy  wears 
motley,  criticism  of  this  kind  operates  in  much 
the  same  manner  as  if  it  were  to  contend  that 
an  approximately  exact  and  beautiful  Ben  Ali 
Haggin  tableau  vivant  reproduction  of,  say, 
Velasquez's  "The  Spinners,"  was  creative  art 
in  the  sense  that  the  original  is  creative  art. 
Acting  is  to  the  art  of  the  drama  much  what 
these  so-called  living  pictures  are  to  the  art 
of  painting.  If  acting  is  to  be  termed  an  art, 
[103] 


TJie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
it  is,  like  the  living  picture,  a  freak  art,  an  art 
with  belladonna  in  its  eyes  and  ever,  even  at 
its  highest,  a  bit  grotesque. 

In  his  defence  of  acting  as  an  art  equal  to 
that  of  poetry  and  literature,  Henry  Irving 
has  observed,  "It  has  been  said  that  acting  is 
unworthy  because  it  represents  feigned  emo- 
tions, but  this  censure  would  apply  with  equal 
force  to  poet,  or  novelis.t."  But  would  it? 
The  poet  and  the  novelist  may  feign  emotions, 
but  it  is  their  own  active  imaginations  which 
feign  them.  The  actor  pierely  feigns  pas- 
sively the  emotions  which  the  imagination  of 
the  poet  has  actively  feigned ;  if  there  is  feign- 
ing, the  actor  merely  parrots  it.  If  there  is 
feigned  emotion  in,  say,  the  second  stanza  of 
Swinburne's  "Rococo,"  and  I  mount  an  illu- 
minated platform  and  recite  the  stanza  very 
eloquently  and  impressively,  am  I  precisely 
feigning  the  emotion  of  it  or  am  I  merely 
feigning  the  emotion  that  the  great  imagina- 
tion of  Swinburne  has  feigned?  Feigned  or 
unfeigned,  the  emotions  of  the  poet  come 
ready-made  to  the  heart  and  lips  of  the  actor. 
[104] 


The  Place  of  Acting 

Continues  Irving  further:  "It  is  the  actor 
who  gives  body  to  the  ideas  of  the  highest 
dramatic  hterature — fire,  force,  and  sensibil- 
ity, without  which  they  would  remain  for 
most  people  mere  airy  abstractions."  What 
one  engages  here  is  the  peculiar  logic  that  act- 
ing is  an  art  since  it  popularizes  dramatic 
Hterature  and  makes  it  intelligible  to  a  ma- 
jority of  dunderheads! 

One  more  quotation  from  this  actor's  de- 
fence, and  we  may  pass  on.  "The  actor's 
work  is  absolutely  concrete,"  he  challenges. 
"He  is  brought  in  every  phase  of  his  work  into 
direct  comparison  with  existing  things.  .  .  . 
Not  only  must  his  dress  be  suitable  to  the  part 
which  he  assumes,  but  his  bearing  must  not  be 
in  any  way  antagonistic  to  the  spirit  of  the 
time  in  which  the  play  is  fixed.  The  free 
bearing  of  the  sixteenth  century  is  distinct 
from  the  artificial  one  of  the  seventeenth,  the 
mannered  one  of  the  eighteenth,  and  the  care- 
less one  of  the  nineteenth.  .  .  .  The  voice 
must  be  modulated  to  the  vogue  of  the  time. 
The  habitual  action  of  a  rapier-bearing  age 
[105] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
is  different  from  that  of  a  mail-clad  one — nay, 
the  armour  of  a  period  ruled  in  real  life  the 
poise  and  bearing  of  the  body;  and  all  this 
must  be  reproduced  on  the  stage.  .  .  .  It  can- 
not therefore  he  seriously  put  forward  in  the 
face  of  such  manifold  requirements  that  no 
Art  is  required  for  the  representation  of  suit- 
able action!"  The  italics  are  those  of  one  who 
experiences  some  difficulty  in  persuading  him- 
self that  if  Art  is  required  for  such  things  as 
these — dress^  carriage,  Xnodulation  of  voice 
and  carrying  a  sword — Art,  strictly  speaking, 
is  no  less  required  in  the  matter  of  going  to  a 
Quat'-z-Arts  costume  ball. 

Acting  is  pel^haps  best  to  be  criticized  not 
as  art  but  as  colourful  and  impressive  arti- 
fice. Miss  Margaret  Anglin's  Joan  of  Arc  is 
a  more  or  less  admirable  example  of  acting  not 
because  it  is  art  but  because  it  is  a  shrewd, 
vivid  and  beguiling  synthesis  of  various  in- 
trinsically spurious  dodges:  black  tights  to 
make  stout  Anglo-Saxon  hmbs  appear  Gal- 
licly  slender,  a  telescoping  of  words  contain- 
ing the  sound  of  s  to  conceal  a  personal  defect 
[106] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
in  the  structure  of  the  upper  lip,  a  manoeu- 
vring of  the  central  action  up  stage  to  empha- 
size, through  a  familiar  trick  of  the  theatre,  the 
sympathetic  frailty  of  the  character  which  the 
actress  herself  physically  lacks,  two  intakes  of 
breath  before  a  shout  of  defiance  that  the  ef- 
fect of  the  ring  of  the  directly  antecedent 
shout  on  the  part  of  one  of  the  inquisitors  may 
be  diminished.  .  .  .  An  effective  acting  per- 
formance is  like  a  great  explosion;  and  as 
T  N  T  is  made  from  nitric  acid,  which  is  in 
turn  made  from  such  nitrates  as  potassium 
nitrate  or  saltpeter,  which  are  in  turn  derived 
from  the  salts  of  decomposed  guano,  so  is  a 
great  explosion  of  histrionism  similarly  made 
and  derived  from  numerous — and  not  infre- 
quently ludicrous  and  even  vulgar — basic 
elements. 

The  ill-balanced  species  of  criticism  which 
appraises  an  histrionic  performance  as  art  on 
the  sole  ground  of  the  hypnotic  effect  it  pro- 
duces, with  no  inquiry  into  the  means  where- 
by that  effect  is  produced,  might  analogously, 
were  it  to  pursue  this  logic,  appraise  similarly 
[107] 


The  Clitic  and  the  Drama 
as  art  the  j)erformance  of  an  adept  literal  hyp- 
notist. And  with  logic  perhaps  much  more 
sound.  For  if  acting  as  an  art  is  to  be  ap- 
praised in  the  degree  of  the  effect  it  imparts 
to,  and  induces  in,  the  auditor-spectator, 
surely — if  there  is  any  sense  at  all  in  such  a 
method  of  estimate — may  certain  other  such 
performances  as  I  have  suggested  be  similarly 
appraised.  Criticism  rests  upon  a  foundation 
of  logic ;  whatever  it  may  deal  with — aesthetics, 
emotions,  what  not — it  cannot  remove  itself 
entirely  from  that  foundation.  Thus,  if  Mr. 
John  Barrymore  is  an  artist  because,  by  iden- 
tifying the  heart  and  mind  of  his  auditor-spec- 
tator with  some  such  character  as  Fedya  and 
by  suggesting  directly  that  character's  tragic 
degringolade,  he  can  make  the  auditor-spec- 
tator pity  and  cry,  so  too  an  artist — by  the 
rigid  canon  of  aesthetic  criticism — was  Fried- 
rich  Anton  Mesmer,  who  is  said  to  have  been 
able  to  do  the  same  thing. 

What  I  attempt  here  is  no  facile  paradox, 
but  a  reductio  ad  ahsurdum  designed  to  show 
up  the  fallacy  of  the  prevailing  method  of 
[108] 


The  Place  of  Acting 
actor  criticism.  In  criticism  of  the  established 
arts,  there  is  no  such  antic  deportment.  The 
critic  never  confuses  the  stimulations  of  jazz 
music  with  those  of  sound  music,  nor  the  stim- 
ulations of  open  melodrama  with  those  of 
more  profound  drama.  From  each  of  these 
he  receives  stimulations  of  a  kind :  some  super- 
ficial, some  deep.  But  he  inquires,  in  each  in- 
stance, into  the  means  whereby  the  various 
stimulations  were  vouchsafed  to  him.  While 
he  recognizes  the  fact  that  the  sudden  and  un- 
expected shooting  off  of  a  revolver  in  "Secret 
Service"  produces  in  him  a  sensation  of  shock 
as  great  as  the  sudden  and  unexpected  shoot- 
ing off  of  a  revolver  in  "Hedda  Gabler,"  he 
does  not  therefore  promptly,  and  with  no 
further  reasoning,  conclude  that  the  two  sen- 
sations are  of  an  aesthetic  piece.  Nor  does  he 
assume  that,  since  the  nervous  effect  of  the 
fall  to  death  in  "The  Green  Goddess"  and  of 
the  fall  to  death  in  "the  Master  Builder"  af- 
fect him  immediately  in  much  the  same  way, 
both  sensations  are  accordingly  produced  by 
sound  artistic  means.  Nor,  yet  again,  does  he 
[109] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
confuse  the  quality — nor  the  springs  of  that 
quality — of  the  mood  of  wistful  pathos  with 
which  "Poor  Butterfly"  and  "Porgi,  Amor" 
inspire  him.  But  this  confusion  persists  as 
part  and  parcel  of  the  bulk  of  the  criticism  of 
acting.  For  one  Hazlitt,  or  Lamb,  or  Lewes, 
or  Anatole  France  who  retains,  or  has  retained, 
his  clear  discernment  before  the  acted  drama, 
there  are,  and  have  Been,  a  number  tenfold 
who  have  confounded  the  wonders  of  the  pho- 
nograph with  the  wonders  of  Josef  Haydn. 


[110] 


V.      DRAMATIC    CRITICISM 


V.    DRAMATIC  CRITICISM 


ARTHUR  BINGHAM  WALKLEY 
begins  one  of  the  best  books  ever  writ- 
ten on  the  subject  thus :  "It  is  not  to  be 
gainsaid  that  the  word  criticism  has  gradually 
acquired  a  certain  connotation  of  contempt. 
.  .  .  Every  one  who  expresses  opinions,  how- 
ever imbecile,  in  print  calls  himself  a  'critic' 
The  greater  the  ignoramus,  the  greater  the 
likelihood  of  his  posing  as  a  'critic'  "  An  ex- 
cellent book,  as  I  have  said,  with  a  wealth  of 
sharp  talk  in  it,  but  Mr.  Walkley  seems  to  me 
to  err  somewhat  in  his  preliminary  assumption. 
Criticism  has  acquired  a  connotation  of  con- 
tempt less  because  it  is  practised  by  a  major- 
ity of  ignoramuses  than  because  it  is  accepted 
at  full  face  value  by  an  infinitely  greater  ma- 
jority of  ignoramuses.  It  is  not  the  mob  that 
curls  a  lip — ^the  mob  accepts  the  lesser  igno- 
[113] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
ramus  at  his  own  estimate  of  himself;  it  is  the 
lonely  and  negligible  minority  man  who,  paus- 
ing musefully  in  the  field  that  is  the  world, 
contemplates  the  jackasses  eating  the  daisies. 

No  man  is  so  contemptuous  of  criticism  as 
the  well-stocked  critic,  just  as  there  is  no  man 
so  contemptuous  of  clothes  as  the  man  with  the 
well-stocked  wardrobe.  It  is  as  impossible  to 
imagine  a  critic  like  Shaw  not  chuckling  deri- 
sively at  criticism  as  it  is  to  imagine  a  regular 
subscriber  to  the  Weekly  Review  not  swal- 
lowing it  whole.  The  experienced  critic,  be- 
ing on  the  inside,  is  in  a  position  to  look  into 
the  heads  of  the  less  experienced,  and  to  see 
the  wheels  go  round.  He  is  privy  to  all  their 
monkeyshines,  since  he  is  privy  to  his  own. 
Having  graduated  from  quackery,  he  now 
smilingly  regards  others  still  at  the  trade  of 
seriously  advancing  sure  cures  for  aesthetic 
baldness,  cancer,  acne  and  trifacial  neuralgia. 
And  while  the  yokels  rub  in  the  lotions  and 
swallow  the  pills,  he  permits  himself  a  small, 
but  eminently  sardonic,  hiccup. 

It  is  commonly  believed  that  the  first  virtue 
[114] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
of  a  critic  is  honesty.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
in  foui-  cases  out  of  five,  honesty  is  the  last 
virtue  of  a  critic.  As  criticism  is  practised  in 
America,  honesty  presents  itself  as  the  lead- 
ing fault.  There  is  altogether  too  much  hon- 
esty. The  greater  the  blockhead,  the  more 
honest  he  is.  And  as  a  consequence  the  criti- 
cism of  these  blockheads,  founded  upon  their 
honest  convictions,  is  worthless.  There  is 
some  hope  for  an  imbecile  if  he  is  dishonest, 
but  none  if  he  is  resolute  in  sticking  to  his 
idiocies.  If  the  average  American  critic  were 
to  cease  writing  what  he  honestly  believes  and 
dishonestly  set  down  what  he  doesn't  believe, 
the  bulk  of  the  native  criticism  would  gain 
some  common  sense  and  take  on  much  of  the 
Bound  value  that  it  presently  lacks.  Hon- 
esty is  a  toy  for  first-rate  men:  when  lesser 
men  seek  to  play  with  it  and  lick  off  the  paint, 
they  come  down  with  colic. 

It  is  further  maintained  that  enthusiasm  is 
a  supplementary  desideratum  in  a  critic,  that 
unless  he  is  possessed  of  enthusiasm  he  can- 
not impart  a  warm  love  for  fine  things  to  his 
[115] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
reader.  Surely  this,  too,  is  nonsense.  En- 
thusiasm is  a  virtue  not  in  the  critic,  but  in 
the  critic's  reader.  And  such  desired  enthu- 
siasm can  be  directly  generated  by  enthusiasm 
no  more  than  a  glyceryl  nitrate  explosion  can 
be  generated  by  sulfuric  acid.  Enthusiasm 
may  be  made  so  contagious  as  to  elect  a  man 
president  of  the  United  States  or  to  raise  an 
army  large  enough  to  win  a  world  war,  but 
it  has  never  yet  been  made  sufficiently  conta- 
gious to  persuade  one  American  out  of  a  hun- 
dred thousand  that  Michelangelo's  David  of 
the  Signoria  is  a  better  piece  of  work  than  the 
Barnard  statue  of  Lincoln.  Enthusiasm  is 
an  attribute  of  the  uncritical,  the  defectively 
educated:  stump  speakers,  clergymen,  young 
girls,  opera-goers.  Socialists,  Italians,  such 
like.  And  not  only  an  attribute,  but  a 
weapon.  But  the  cultivated  and  experienced 
man  has  as  little  use  for  enthusiasm  as  for  in- 
dignation. He  appreciates  that  while  it  may 
convert  a  pack  of  ignoble  doodles,  it  can't  con- 
vert any  one  worth  converting.  The  latter 
must  be  persuaded,  not  inflamed.  He  real- 
[116] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
izes  that  where  a  double  brass  band  playing 
"Columbia,  the  Gem  of  the  Ocean"  may  leave 
a  civilized  Englishman  cold  to  the  virtues  of 
the  United  States,  proof  that  the  United 
States  has  the  best  bathroom  plumbing  in  the 
world  may  warm  him  up  a  bit.  The  sound 
critic  is  not  a  cheer  leader,  but  a  referee.  Art 
is  hot,  criticism  cold.  Aristotle's  criticism  of 
Euripides  is  as  placid  and  reserved  as  Mr. 
William  Ai'cher's  criticism  of  the  latest 
drama  at  the  St.  James's  Theatre;  Brune- 
tiere  is  as  calm  over  his  likes  as  Mr.  H.  T. 
Parker  of  the  Boston  Transcript.  There  is 
no  more  enthusiasm  in  Lessing  than  there  is 
indignation  in  Walkley.  Hazlitt,  at  a  hun- 
dred degrees  emotional  Fahrenheit,  remains 
critically  cool  as  a  cucumber.  To  find  enthu- 
siasm, you  will  have  to  read  the  New  York 
Times. 

Enthusiasm,  in  short,  is  the  endowment  of 
immaturity.  The  greater  the  critic,  the 
greatier  his  disinclination  to  communicate 
aesthetic  heat.  Such  communication  savours 
of  propaganda  and,  however  worthy  that 
[117] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
propaganda,  he  will  have  naught  to  do  with  its 
trafficking.  If  the  ability  to  possess  and  com- 
municate enthusiasm  is  the  mark  of  the  true 
critic,  then  the  theatrical  page  of  the  N'ew 
York  Jour7ial  is  the  greatest  critical  litera- 
ture in  America. 

A  third  contention  has  it  that  aloofness  and 
detachment  are  no  less  valuable  to  the  dra- 
matic critic  than  honesty  and  enthusiasm. 
Unless  I  am  seriously  mistaken,  also  bosh.^ 
Dramatic  criticism  is  fundamentally  the  crit- 
ic's art  of  appraising  himself  in  terms  of  vari- 
ous forms  of  drama.  Or,  as  I  some  time  ago 
put  it,  the  only  sound  dramatic  critic  is  the 
one  who  reports  less  the  impression  that  this 
or  that  play  makes  upon  him  than  the  impres- 
sion he  makes  upon  this  or  that  play.  Of  all 
the  forms  of  criticism,  dramatic  criticism  is 
essentially,  and  perhaps  correctly,  the  most 
personal.  Tell  me  what  a  dramatic  critic  eats 
and  drinks,  how  far  north  of  Ninetieth  Street 
he  lives,  what  he  considers  a  pleasant  evening 
when  he  is  not  in  the  theatre,  and  what  kind 
of  lingerie  his  wife  wears,  and  I'll  tell  you 
[118] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
with  very  few  misses  what  kind  of  critic  he  is. 
I'll  tell  you  whether  he  is  fit  to  appreciate 
Schnitzler,  or  whether  he  is  fit  only  for  Aug- 
ustus Thomas.  I'll  tell  you  in  advance  what 
he  will  think  about,  and  how  he  will  react  to, 
Hauptmann,  Sacha  Guitry  or  George  V. 
Hobart.  I'll  tell  you  whether  he  is  the  sort 
that  makes  a  great  to-do  when  his  eagle  eye 
spots  Sir  Nigel  Waterhouse,  M.  P.,  in  Act  II 
fingering  a  copy  of  the  Philadelphia  Public 
Ledger  instlead  of  the  London  Times,  and 
whether  he  is  the  sort  that  writes  "JNlr.  John 
Cort  has  staged  the  play  in  his  customary 
lavish  manner"  when  the  rise  of  the  curtain 
discloses  to  him  a  room  elaborately  decorated 
in  the  latest  Macy  mode.  To  talk  about  the 
value  of  detachment  in  a  dramatic  critic  is  to 
talk  about  the  value  of  detachment  in  a 
Swiss  mountain  guide.  The  criticism  is  the 
man;  the  man  the  criticism. 

Of  all  forms  of  criticism,   dramatic  criti- 
cism is  the  most  purely  biological.     Were  the 
genii  to  put  the  mind  of  Max  Beerbohm  into 
the  head  of  Mr.  J.  Ranken  Towse,  and  vice 
[119] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
versa,  their  criticisms  would  still  remain  ex- 
actly as  they  are.  But,  on  the  contrary,  were 
the  head  of  Mr.  J.  Ranken  Towse  to  be  placed 
on  the  body  of  JNIax  Beerbohm,  and  vice  versa, 
their  criticisms  would  take  on  points  of  view 
diametrically  opposed  to  their  present.  Max 
would  begin  admiring  the  Rev.  Dr.  Charles 
Rann  Kennedy  and  Towse  would  promptly 
proceed  to  put  on  his  glasses  to  get  a  better 
view  of  the  girl  on  the  end.  Every  book  of 
dramatic  criticism — every  single  piece  of 
dramatic  criticism — is  a  searching,  illuminat- 
ing autobiography.  The  dramatic  critic  per- 
forms a  clinic  upon  himself  every  time  he  takes 
his  pen  in  his  hand.  He  may  try,  as  Walkley 
puts  it,  to  substitute  for  the  capital  I's  "nouns 
of  multitude  signifying  many,"  or  some  of 
those  well-worn  stereotypes — "It  is  thought," 
"one  may  be  pardoned  for  hinting,"  "will  any 
one  deny?"  etc.,  etc. — by  which  criticism  keeps 
up  the  pretence  that  it  is  not  a  man  but  a  cor- 
poration, but  he  fools  no  one. 

To  ask  the  dramatic  critic  to  keep  himself 
out  of  his  criticism,  to  detach  himself,  is  thus 
[120] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
a  trifle  like  asking  an  actor  to  keep  himself  out 
of  his  role.  Dramatic  critics  and  actors  are 
much  alike.  The  only  essential  difference  is 
that  the  actor  does  his  acting  on  a  platform. 
But,  platform  or  no  platform,  the  actor  and 
the  dramatic  critic  best  serve  their  roles  when 
they  filter  them  through  their  own  personali- 
ties. A  dramatic  critic  who  is  told  to  keep 
his  personality  out  of  his  criticism  is  in  the 
position  of  an  actor  w^ho,  being  physically  and 
temperamentally  like  Mr.  John  Barrymore,  is 
peremptorily  directed  by  a  producer  to  stick 
a  sofa  pillow  under  his  belt,  put  on  six  extra 
heel-lifts,  acquire  a  w^hiskey  voice  and  play 
Falstaff  like  the  late  Sir  Herbert  Tree.  The 
best  di-amatic  critics  from  the  time  of  Quintus 
Horatius  Flaccus  (vide  the  "Epistola")  have 
sunk  their  vivid  personalities  into  their  work 
right  up  to  the  knees.  N'ot  only  have  they  de- 
scribed the  adventures  of  their  souls  among 
masterpieces,  but  the  adventures  of  their  kid- 
neys, spleens  and  cceca  as  well.  Each  has  held 
the  mirror  of  drama  up  to  his  own  nature, 
with  all  its  idiosyncrasies.  And  in  it  have 
[121] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
been  sharply  reflected  not  the  cut  and  dried 
features  of  the  professor,  but  the  vital  fea- 
tures of  a  red-alive  man.  The  other  crit- 
ics have  merely  held  up  the  mirror  to  these 
red-alive  men,  and  have  reflected  not  them- 
selves but  the  latter.  Then,  in  their  vain- 
glory, they  have  looked  again  into  the  hand- 
glass and  have  mistaken  the  reflection  of  the 
parrot  for  an  eagle. 

A  third  rubber-stamp:  the  critic  must  have 
sympathy.  As  properly  contend  that  a  sur- 
geon must  have  sympathy.  The  word  is  mis- 
used. What  the  critic  must  have  is  not  sym- 
pathy, which  in  its  common  usage  bespeaks  a 
measure  of  sentimental  concern,  but  interest. 
If  a  dramatic  critic,  for  example,  has  sym- 
pathy for  an  actress  he  can  no  more  criticize 
her  with  poise  than  a  surgeon  can  operate  on 
his!  own  wife.  The  critic  may  on  occasion 
have  sympathy  as  the  judge  in  a  court  of  law 
may  on  occasion  have  it,  but  if  he  is  a  fair 
critic,  or  a  fair  judge,  he  can't  do  anything 
about  it,  however  much  he  would  like  to.  Be- 
tween the  fair  defendant  in  the  lace  baby  collar 
[122] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
and  a  soft  heart,  Article  X,  Section  123,  Page 
416,  absurdly  interposes  itself.  (In  example, 
being  a  human  being  with  a  human  being's 
weaknesses  before  a  critic,  I  would  often  rather 
praise  a  lovely  one  when  she  is  bad  than  an 
unlovely  one  when  she  is  good — and,  alas,  I 
fear  that  I  sometimes  do — but  in  the  general 
run  I  try  to  remember  my  business  and  behave 
myself.  It  isn't  always  easy.  But  I  do  my 
best,  and  angels  and  Lewes  could  do  no 
more.)  The  word  sympathy  is  further  mis- 
handled, as  in  the  similar  case  of  the  word 
enthusiasm.  What  a  critic  should  have  is  not, 
as  is  common,  sympathy  and  enthusiasm 
before  the  fact,  but  after  it.  The  critic  who 
enters  a  theatre  bubblingly  certain  that  he  is 
going  to  have  a  good  time  is  no  critic.  The 
critic  is  he  who  leaves  a  theatre  cheerfully 
certain  that  he  has  had  a  good  time.  ^  em- 
pathy and  enthusiasm,  unless  they  are  ea^  post 
facto  J  are  precisely  like  prevenient  prejudice 
and  hostility.  Sympathy  has  no  more  prelim- 
inary place  in  the  equipment  of  a  critic  than 
in  the  equipment  of  an  ambulance  driver  or  a 
[123] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
manufacturer  of  bird  cages.     It  is  the  caboose 
of  criticism,  not  the  engine. 

The  trouble  with  dramatic  criticism  in 
America,  speaking  generally,  is  that  where  it 
is  not  frankly  reportorial  it  too  often  seeks  to 
exhibit  a  personality  when  there  exists  no  per- 
sonality to  exhibit.  Himself  perhaps  con- 
scious of  this  lack,  the  critic  indulges  in  heroic 
makeshifts  to  inject  into  his  writings  a  note  of 
individuality,  and  the  only  individuality  that 
comes  out  of  his  perspirations  is  of  a  piece 
with  that  of  the  bearded  lady  or  the  dog- 
faced  boy.  Individuality  of  this  freak  species 
is  the  bane  of  the  native  criticism.  The  col- 
lege professor  who,  having  nothing  to  say,  tries 
to  give  his  criticism  an  august  air  by  figura- 
tively attaching  to  it  a  pair  of  whiskers  and 
horn  glasses,  the  suburban  college  professor 
who  sedulously  practises  an  aloofness  from  the 
madding  crowd  that  his  soul  longs  to  be  part 
of,  the  college  professor  who  postures  as  a 
man  of  the  world,  the  newspaper  reporter  who 
postures  as  a  college  professor,  the  journalist 
who  performs  in  terms  of  Art  between  the 
[124] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
Saks  and  Gimbel  advertisements — these  and 
others  Hke  them  are  the  sad  comedians  in  the 
tragical  crew.  In  their  heavy  attempts  to 
hve  up  to  their  fancy  dress  costumes,  in  their 
laborious  efforts  to  conceal  their  humdrum 
personalities  in  the  uncomfortable  gauds  of 
Petruchio  and  Gobbo,  they  betray  themselves 
even  to  the  bus  boys.  The  same  performer 
cannot  occupy  the  roles  of  Polonius  and  Ham- 
let, even  in  a  tank  town  troupe. 

No  less  damaging  to  American  dramatic 
criticism  is  the  dominant  notion  that  criticism, 
to  be  valuable,  must  be  constructive.  That  is, 
that  it  must,  as  the  phrase  has  it,  "build  up" 
rather  than  "tear  down."  As  a  result  of  this 
conviction  we  have  an  endless  repertoire  of 
architectonic  advice  from  critics  wholly  with- 
out the  structural  faculty,  advice  which,  were 
it  followed,  would  produce  a  drama  twice  as 
poor  as  that  which  they  criticize.  Obsessed 
with  the  idea  that  they  must  be  constructive, 
the  critics  know  no  lengths  to  which  they  will 
not  go  in  their  sweat  to  dredge  up  cures  of 
one  sort  or  another.  They  constructively 
[125] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
point  out  that  Shaw's  plays  would  be  better 
plays  if  Shaw  understood  the  punctual  tech- 
nique of  Pinero,  thus  destroying  a  "Caesar  and 
Cleopatra"  to  construct  a  "Second  Mrs.  Tan- 
queray."  They  constructively  point  out  the 
trashy  aspect  of  some  Samuel  Shipman's 
"Friendly  Enemies,"  suggest  more  serious  en- 
terprises to  him,  and  get  the  poor  soul  to  write 
a  "The  Unwritten  Chapter"  which  is  ten 
times  as  bad.  They  are  not  content  to  be 
critics;  they  must  also  be  playwrights.  They 
stand  in  mortal  fear  of  the  old  recrimination, 
"He  wiho  can,  does;  he  who  can't,  criticizes," 
not  pausing  to  realize  that  the  names  of  Mr. 
Octavus  Roy  Cohen  and  Matthew  Arnold  may 
be  taken  as  somewhat  confounding  respective 
examples.  They  note  with  some  irritation  that 
the  critic  for  the  Wentzville,  Mo.,  Beacon  is  a 
destructive  critic,  but  are  conveniently  igno- 
rant of  the  fact — which  may  conceivably  prove 
something  more — that  so  was  George  Farqu- 
har.  If  destructive  criticism,  in  their  mean- 
ing, is  criticism  which  pulls  down  without 
building  up  in  return,  ,three-fourths  of  the 
[126] 


Dramatic  Criticisni 
best  dramatic  criticism  written  since  the  time 
of  Boileau,  fully  filling  the  definition,  is 
worthless.  One  can't  cure  a  yellow  fever  pa- 
tient by  pointing  out  to  him  that  he  should 
have  caught  the  measles.  One  can't  improve 
the  sanitary  condition  of  a  neighbourhood 
merely  by  giving  the  outhouse  a  different  coat 
of  paint.  The  foe  of  destructive  criticism  is 
the  pro-German  of  American  art. 

Our  native  criticism  suffers  further  from 
Ithe  commercial  Puritanism  of  its  mediums. 
What  is  often  mistaken  for  the  Puritanism  of 
the  critic  is  actually  the  commercial  Puri- 
tanism forced  upon  him  by  the  owner  and  pub- 
lisher of  the  journal  in  which  his  writings  ap- 
pear, and  upon  which  he  has  to  depend  for  a 
livelihood.  Although  this  owner  and  pub- 
lisher is  often  not  personally  the  Puritan,  he 
is  yet  shrewdly  aware  that  the  readers  of  his 
journal  are,  and  out  of  this  awareness  he  be- 
comes what  may  be  termed  a  circulation  blue- 
nose.  Since  circulation  and  advertising  rev- 
enue are  twins,  he  must  see  to  it  that  the  sen- 
sibilities of  the  former  are  not  offended.  And 
[127] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
his  circumspection,  conveyed  to  the  critic  by 
the  copy  reader  or  perhaps  only  sensed,  brings 
about  the  Puritan  play-acting  by  the  critic. 
This  accounts  to  no  little  degree  for  the  hos- 
tile and  uncritical  reviews  of  even  the  most 
finished  risque  farces,  and  of  the  best  efforts 
of  American  and  European  playwrights  to 
depict  truthfully  and  fairly  the  more  unpleas- 
ant phases  of  sex.  "I  agree  with  you  that 
this  last  naughty  farce  of  Avery  Hopwood's 
is  awfully  funny  stuff,"  a  IVew  York  news- 
paper reviewer  once  said  to  me;  "I  laughed 
at  it  until  my  ribs  ached;  but  I  don't  dare 
write  as  much.  One  can't  praise  such  things 
in  a  paper  with  the  kind  of  circulation  that 
ours  has."  It  is  criticism  bred  from  this  com- 
mercial Puritanism  that  has  held  back  farce 
writing  in  America,  and  I  venture  to  say 
much  serious  dramatic  writing  as  well.  The 
best  farce  of  a  Guitry  or  a  Dieudonne, 
produced  in  America  today  without  childish 
excisions,  would  receive  unfavourable  notices 
from  nine  newspapers  out  of  ten.  The  best 
sex  drama  of  a  Porto-Riche  or  a  Wedekind 
[128] 


Dramatic  Criticism 
would  suffer — indeed,  already  has  suffered — 
a  similar  fate.  I  predicted  to  Eugene 
O'Neill,  the  moment  I  laid  down  the  manu- 
script of  his  pathological  play  "Diff'rent,"  the 
exact  manner  in  which,  two  months  later,  the 
axes  fell  upon  him. 

For  one  critic  hke  Mr.  J.  Ranken  Towse 
who  is  a  Puritan  by  tradition  and  training, 
there  are  a  dozen  who  are  Puritans  by  proxy. 
One  can  no  more  imagine  a  dramatic  critic  on 
a  newspaper  owned  by  Mr.  Cyrus  H.  K.  Cur- 
tis praising  Schnitzler's  "Reigen"  or  Rip's  and 
Gignoux's  "Scandale  de  Deauville"  than  one 
can  imagine  the  same  critic  denouncing  "Ben 
Hur."  What  thus  holds  true  in  journalistic 
criticism  holds  true  in  precisely  the  same  way 
in  the  criticism  written  by  the  majority  of 
college  professors.  I  doubt  that  there  is  a 
college  professor  in  America  today  who,  how- 
ever much  he  admired  a  gay,  reprobate  farce 
like  "Le  Rubicon"  or  "L'lllusioniste,"  would 
dare  state  his  admiration  in  print.  Puritan 
or  no  Puritan,  it  is  professionally  necessary 
for  him  to  comport  himself  as  one.  His  uni- 
[129] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
versity  demands  it,  silently,  sternly,  idioti- 
cally. He  is  the  helpless  victim  of  its  aes- 
thetic Ku  Klux.  Behind  any  drama  dealing 
unconventionally  with  sex,  there  hovers  a 
spectre  that  vaguely  resembles  Professor 
Scott  Nearing.  He  sees  it  ...  he  reflects 
...  he  works  up  a  safe  indignation. 

Dramatic  criticism  travels,  in  America, 
carefully  laid  tracks.  Signal  lights,  sema- 
phores and  one-legged  old  men  with  red  flags 
are  stationed  along  the  way  to  protect  it  at 
the  crossings,  to  make  it  safe,  and  to  guard  it 
from  danger.  It  e],laborately  steams,  pulls, 
puffs,  chugs,  toots,  whistles,  grinds  and  rum- 
bles for  three  hundred  miles — and  brings  up  at 
something  like  Hinkletown,  Pa.  It  is  eager, 
but  futile.  It  is  honest,  but  so  is  Dr.  Frank 
Crane.  It  is  fearless,  but  so  is  the  actor  who 
plays  the  hero  strapped  to  the  papier-mache 
buzz-saw.  It  is  constructive,  but  so  is  an  em- 
balmer.  It  is  detached,  but  so  is  a  man  in  the 
Fiji  Islands.  It  is  sympathetic,  but  so  is  a 
quack  prostatitician. 

[1301 


VI.      DRAMATIC    CRITICISM    IN 
AMERICA 


VI.     DRAIMATIC  CRITICISM  IN 
AMERICA 


DRAMATIC  criticism,  at  its  best,  is 
the  adventure  of  an  intelligence 
among  emotions.  The  chief  end 
of  drama  is  the  enkindling  of  emotions;  the 
chief  end  of  dramatic  criticism  is  to  inish  into 
the  burning  building  and  rescue  the  metaphy- 
sical weaklings  who  are  wont  to  be  overcome 
by  the  first  faint  whiffs  of  smoke. 

Dramatic  criticism,  in  its  common  run, 
fails  by  virtue  of  its  confusion  of  unschooled 
emotion  with  experienced  emotion.  A  dra- 
matic critic  who  has  never  been  kissed  may 
properly  appreciate  the  readily  assimilable 
glories  of  "Romeo  and  Juliet,"  but  it  is  doubt- 
ful that  he  will  be  able  properly  to  appreciate 
the  somewhat  more  evasive  splendoui's  of 
"Liebelei."  The  capability  of  a  judge  does 
[133] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
not,  of  course,  depend  upon  his  having  him- 
self once  been  in  jail,  nor  does  the  capability 
of  a  critic  depend  upon  his  having  personally 
once  experienced  the  emotions  of  the  drama- 
tis personae,  but  that  critic  is  nevertheless  the 
most  competent  whose  emotions  the  dramatis 
personae  do  not  so  much  anticipatorily  stir  up 
as  recollectively  soothe. 

All  critidism  is  more  or  less  a  statement  in 
terms  of  the  present  of  what  one  has  viewed 
of  the  past  through  a  delicate,  modern  reduc- 
ing-glass.  Intelligence  is  made  up,  in  large 
part,  of  dead  emotions;  ignorance,  of  emo- 
tions that  have  lived  on,  deaf  and  dumb  and 
crippled,  but  ever  smiling.  The  general  ad- 
mission that  a  dramatic  critic  must  be  experi- 
enced in  drama,  literature,  acting  and  theories 
of  production  but  not  necessarily  in  emotions 
is;  somewhat  difficidt  ^of  digestion*  Such  a 
critic  may  conceivably  comprehend  much  of 
Sheridan,  Moliere,  Bernhardt  and  Yevrey- 
noff,  but  a  hundred  searching  and  admirable 
things  like  the  beginning  of  "Anatol,"  the 
middle  of  "Lonely  Lives"  and  the  end  of 
[134] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
"The  Case  of  Rebellious  Susan"  must  inevita- 
bly be  without  his  ken,  and  baffle  his  efforts  at 
sound  penetration.  I  do  not  here  postm-e 
myself  as  one  magnificently  privy  to  all  the 
mysteries,  but  rather  as  one  who,  failing  per- 
haps to  be  on  very  intimate  terms  with  them, 
detects  and  laments  the  deficiencies  that  con- 
found him.  Experience,  goeth  the  saw,  is  a 
wise  master.  But  it  is,  for  the  critic,  an  even 
wiser  slave.  A  critic  on  the  INIarseilles  Petits 
Pois  may  critically  admire  "La  Derniere  Nuit 
de  Don  Juan,"  but  it  takes  an  Anatole  France 
critically  to  understand  it. 

The  superficial  quality  of  American  emo- 
tions, sociological  and  aesthetic,  enjoyed  by  the 
great  majority  of  American  critics,  operates 
extensively  against  profundity  in  American 
criticism — in  that  of  literature  and  music  no 
less  than  that  of  drama.  American  emotions, 
speaking  in  the  mass,  where  they  are  not  the 
fixed  and  obvious  emotions  ingenerate  in  most 
countries — such  as  love  of  home,  family  and 
country,  and  so  on — are  one-syllable  emotions, 
primary-colour  emotions.  The  polysyllabic 
[135] 


Tlie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
and  pastel  emotions  are  looked  on  as  dubious, 
even  degenerate.  No  man,  for  example,  who, 
though  absolutely  faithful  to  his  wife,  con- 
fessed openly  that  he  had  winked  an  eye  at  a 
ballet  girl  could  conceivably  be  elected  to 
membership  in  the  Union  League  Club.  The 
man  who,  after  a  cocktail,  indiscreetly  gave 
away  the  news  that  he  had  felt  a  tear  of  joy 
in  his  eye  when  he  heard  the  minuet  of  Mo- 
zart's G  minor  symphony  or  a  tear  of  sadness 
when  he  looked  upon  Corot's  "La  Solitude," 
Iwould,  be  promptly  set  down  by  the  mother 
members  of  the  golf  club  as  a  dipsomaniac 
who  was  doubtless  taking  narcotics  on  the 
side.  If  a  member  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  were 
toi  glance  out  of  the  window  and  suddenly 
ejaculate,  "My,  what  a  beautiful  girl!"  the 
superintendent  would  immediately  grab  him 
by  the  seat  of  the  pantaloons  and  throw  him 
down  the  back  stairs.  And  if  a  member  of 
the  American  Legion  were  to  sniffle  so  mudh 
as  once  when  the  orchestra  in  the  Luna  Park 
dance  hall  played  "Wiener  Blut,"  a  spy 
would  seize  him  by  the  ear  and  hurry  him  be- 
[136] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
fore  the  heads  of  the  organization  as  a  suspi- 
cious   fellow,    in    all   probability   of    German 
blood. 

The  American  is  either  ashamed  of  honest 
emotion  or,  if  he  is  not  ashamed,  is  soon 
shamed  into  shame  by  his  neighbours.  He  is 
profoundly  affected  by  any  allusion  to  Mother, 
the  Baby,  or  the  Flag — the  invincible  trinity 
of  American  dramatic  hokum — and  his  reac- 
tions thereto  meet  with  the  full  favour  of 
church  and  state;  but  he  is  unmoved,  he  is 
silently  forbidden  to  be  moved,  by  a  love  that 
doesn't  happen  to  fall  into  the  proper  pigeon- 
hole, by  a  work  of  great  beauty  that  doesn't 
happen  to  preach  a  backwoods  Methodist  ser- 
mon, by  sheer  loveliness,  or  majesty,  or  un- 
adorned truth.  And  this  corsetted  emotion, 
mincing,  wasp-waisted  and  furtive,  colours 
all  native  criticism.  It  makes  the  dramatic 
critic  ashamed  of  simple  beauty,  and  forbids 
him  honestly  to  admire  the  mere  loveliness  of 
such  exhibitions  as  Ziegfeld's.  It  makes  him 
ashamed  of  passion,  and  forbids  him  honestly 
to  admire  such  excellent  dramas  as  Georges  de 
[137] 


Tlie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Porto-Riche's  "Amoureuse."  It  makes  him 
ashamed  of  laughter,  and  forbids  him  to 
chuckle  at  the  little  naughtinesses  of  Sacha 
Guitry  and  his  own  Avery  Hopwood.  It 
makes  him  ashamed  of  truth,  and  forbids  him 
to  regard  with  approbation  such  a  play  as 
"The  Only  Law."  The  American  drama 
must  therefore  not  create  new  emotions  for 
him,  but  must  hold  the  battered  old  mirror  up 
to  his  own.  It  must  warm  him  not  with  new, 
splendid  and  worldly  emotions,  but  must  sat- 
isfy him  afresh  as  to  the  integrity  and  higher 
merit  of  his  own  restricted  parcel  of  emotions. 
It  must  abandon  all  new,  free  concepts  of 
love  and  life,  of  romance  and  adventure  and 
glory,  and  must  reassure  him — with  appro- 
priate quiver-music — that  the  road  to  heaven 
is  up  Main  Street  and  the  road  to  hell  down 
the  Avenue  de  FOpera. 

Though  there  is  a  regrettable  trace  of  snob- 
bery in  the  statement,  it  yet  remains  that — 
with  half  a  dozen  or  so  quickly  recognizable 
exceptions — the  practitioners  of  dramatic  crit- 
icism in  America  are  in  the  main  a  humbly- 
[138] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
born,  underpaid  and  dowdy-lived  lot.  This 
was  as  true  of  them  yesterday  as  it  is  today. 
And  as  Harlem,  delicatessen-store  dinners^ 
napkin-rings  and  the  Subway  are  not,  per- 
haps, best  conducive  to  a  polished  and  suavely 
cosmopolitan  outlook  on  life  and  romance  and 
enthralling  beauty,  we  have  had  a  dramatic 
criticism  pervaded  by  a  vainglorious  homeli- 
ness, by  a  side-street  aesthetic,  and  by  not  a 
little  of  the  difficultly  suppressed  rancour  that 
human  nature  ever  feels  in  the  presence  of  ad- 
mired yet  unachievable  situations.  Up  to 
fifteen  years  ago,  drama  in  America  was  com- 
pelled critically  to  meet  with,  and  adhere 
strictly  to,  the  standards  of  life,  culture  and 
romance  as  they  obtained  over  on  Mr.  Wil- 
liam Winter's  Staten  Island.  Since  Winter's 
death,  it  has  been  urged  critically  to  abandon 
the  standards  of  Staten  Island  and  comply 
instead  with  the  eminently  more  sophisticated 
standards  derived  from  a  four  years'  study  of 
Cicero,  Stumpf  and  the  Norwegian  system  of 
communal  elections  at  Harvard  or  Catawba 
College,  combined  with  a  two  weeks'  stay  in 
[139] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
Paris.  For  twenty  years,  Ibsen  and  Pinero 
suffered  the  American  critical  scourge  be- 
cause they  had  not  been  born  and  brought  up 
in  a  town  with  a  bust  of  Cotton  Mather  or 
WilHam  Cullen  Bryant  in  its  pubhc  square, 
and  did  not  think  quite  the  same  way  about 
things  as  Horace  Greeley.  For  twenty  years 
more,  Porto-Riche  and  Frenchmen  like  him 
will  doubtless  suffer  similarly  because,  in  a 
given  situation,  they  do  not  act  precisely  as 
Mr.  Frank  A.  Munsey  or  Dr.  Stuart  Pratt 
Sherman  would;  for  twenty  years  more, 
Hauptmann  and  other  Germans  will  doubt- 
less be  viewed  with  a  certain  measure  of  con- 
descension because  they  have  not  enjoyed  the 
same  advantages  as  Professor  Brander  Mat- 
thews in  buying  Liberty  Bonds,  at  par. 

American  dramatic  criticism  is,  and  always 
has  been,  essentially  provincial.  It  began  by 
mistaking  any  cheap  melodrama  like  "The 
Charity  Ball"  or  "The  Wife"  which  was  cam- 
ouflaged with  a  few  pots  of  palms  and  half  a 
dozen  dress  suits  for  a  study  of  American  so- 
ciety. It  progressed  by  appraising  as  the 
[140] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
dean  of  American  dramatists  and  as  the  lead- 
ing American  dramatic  thinker  a  playwright 
who  wrote  such  stuff  as  "All  over  this  great 
land  thousands  of  trains  run  every  day,  start- 
ing and  arriving  in  punctual  agreement  be- 
'cause  this  is  a  woman's  world!  The  great 
steamships,  dependable  almost  as  the  sun — a 
million  factories  in  civilization — the  countless 
looms  and  lathes  of  industry — the  legions  of 
labour  that  weave  the  riches  of  the  world — all 
— all  move  by  the  mainspring  of  man's  faith 
in  woman!"  It  has  come  to  flower  today  in 
denouncing  what  the  best  European  critics 
have  proclaimed  to  be  the  finest  example  of 
American  fantastic  comedy  on  the  profound 
ground  that  "it  is  alien  to  American  mor- 
ality," and  in  hailing  as  one  of  the  most  acute 
studies  of  a  certain  typical  phase  of  American 
life  a  comedy  filched  substantially  from  the 
French. 

The  plush-covered  provincialism  of  the  na- 
tive dramatic  criticism,  operating  in  this  wise 
against  conscientious  drama  and   sound   ap- 
preciation of  conscientious  drama,  constantly 
[141] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
betrays  itself  for  all  the  chintz  hocus-pocus 
with  which  it  seeks  drolly  to  conceal  that  pro- 
vincialism. For  all  its  easy  incorporation  of 
French  phrases  laboriously  culled  from  the 
back  of  Webster,  its  casually  injected  allu- 
sions to  the  Uberbrett'l,  Stanislav  Pshibui- 
shevsky,  the  excellent  cwmof  de  Chevreuil 
sauce  poivrade  to  be  had  in  the  little  restaurant 
near  the  comfort  station  in  the  Place  Pigalle, 
and  the  bewitching  eyes  of  the  prima  ballerina 
in  the  1917  Y.  M.  C.  A.  show  at  Epernay,  it 
lets  its  mask  fall  whenever  it  is  confronted  in 
the  realistic  flesh  by  one  or  another  of  the  very 
things  against  which  it  has  postured  its  cos- 
mopolitanism. Thus  does  the  mask  fall,  and 
reveal  the  old  pair  of  suburban  eyes,  before 
the  "indelicacy"  of  French  dramatic  master- 
pieces, before  the  "polished  wit"  of  British 
polished  witlessness,  before  the  "stodginess" 
of  the  German  master  depictions  of  stodgy 
German  peasantry,  before  the  "gloom"  of 
Russian  dramatic  photography,  before  the 
"sordidness"  of  "Countess  Julie"  and  the 
"wholesomeness"  of  "The  Old  Homestead." 
[142] 


Dramatic  Criticism,  in  America 
Cosmopolitanism  is  a  heritage,  not  an  acqui- 
sition. It  may  be  born  to  a  man  in  a  wooden 
shack  in  Hardin  County,  in  Kentucky,  or  in 
a  Kttle  cottage  in  Hampshire  in  England,  or 
in  a  garret  of  Paris,  but,  unless  it  is  so  born 
to  him,  a  thousand  Cunard  liners  and  Orient 
Expresses  cannot  bring  it  to  him.  All  criti- 
cism is  geography  of  the  mind  and  geometry 
of  the  heart.  American  criticism  suffers  in 
that  what  assthetic  wanderlust  its  mind  experi- 
ences is  confined  to  excursion  trips,  and  in 
that  what  x  its  heart  seeks  to  discover  is  an 
unknown  quantity  only  to  emotional  sub- 
freshmen. 

Criticism  is  personal,  or  it  is  nothing.  Talk 
to  me  of  impersonal  criticism,  and  I'll  talk  to 
you  of  impersonal  sitz-bathing.  Impersonal 
criticism  is  the  dodge  of  the  critic  without  per- 
sonality. Some  men  marry  their  brother's 
widowj;  some  earn  a  livelihood  imitating 
George  M.  Cohan;  some  write  impersonal 
criticism.  Show  me  how  I  can  soundly  criti- 
cize Mrs.  Fiske  as  Hannele  without  comment- 
ing on  the  mature  aspect  of  the  lady's  stentop- 
[143] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
gia,  and  I  shall  begin  to  believe  that  there  may 
be  something  in  the  impersonal  theory.  Show 
me  how  I  can  soundly  criticize  the  drama  of 
Wedekind  without  analyzing  Wedekind,  the 
man,  and  I  shall  believe  in  the  theory  to  the 
full.  It  is  maintained  by  the  apostles  of  the 
theory  that  the  dramatic  critic  is  in  the  posi- 
tion of  a  judge  in  the  court  of  law:  that  his 
concern,  like  that  of  the  latter,  is  merely  with 
the  evidence  presented  to  him,  not  with  the 
personalities  of  those  who  submit  the  evidence. 
Nothing  could  be  more  idiotic.  The  judge 
who  does  not  take  into  consideration,  for  ex- 
ample, that — whatever  the  nature  of  the  evi- 
dence— the  average  Italian,  or  negro,  or  Ar- 
menian before  him  is  in  all  probability  lying 
like  the  devil  is  no  more  equipped  to  be  a 
sound  judge  than  the  dramatic  critic  who,  for 
all  the  stage  evidence,  fails  to  take  into  con- 
sideration that  Strindberg  personally  was  a 
lunatic,  that  Pinero,  while  treating  of  British 
impulses  and  dharacter,  is  himself  of  ineradi- 
cable Portuguese  mind  and  blood,  that  the  in- 
spiration of  D'Annunzio  came  not  from  a 
[144] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
woman  out  of  life  but  from  a  woman  out  of 
the  greenroom,  and  that  Shaw  is  a  legal  virgin. 
Just  as  dramatic  criticism,  as  it  is  practised 
in  America,  is  Mason- jar  criticism — criticism, 
that  is,  obsessed  by  a  fixed  determination  to 
put  each  thing  it  encounters  into  an  air-tight 
bottle  and  to  label  it — so  is  this  dramatic  crit- 
icism itself  in  turn  subjected  to  the  bottling 
and  labelling  process.  A  piece  of  criticism, 
however  penetrating,  that  is  not  couched  in  the 
language  of  the  commencement  address  of  the 
president  of  Millsaps  College,  and  that  fails 
to  include  a  mention  of  the  Elizabethan  theati*e 
and  a  quotation  from  Victor  Hugo's  "Her- 
nani,"  is  labelled  "journalistic."  A  criticism 
that  elects  to  make  its  points  with  humour 
rather  than  without  humour  is  labelled  "flip- 
pant." A  criticism  that  shows  a  wide  knowl- 
edge of  everything  but  the  subject  in  hand 
is  labelled  "scholarly."  One  that,  however 
empty,  prefixes  every  name  with  a  Mr.  and 
somewhere  in  it  discloses  the  fact  that  the 
critic  is  sixty-five  years  old  is  labelled  "digni- 
fied." One  that  is  full  of  hard  common  sense 
[145] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
from  beginning  to  end  but  is  guilty  of  wit  is 
derogatorily  labelled  "an  imitation  of  Bernard 
Shaw."  One  that  says  an  utterly  worthless 
play  is  an  utterly  worthless  play,  and  then 
shuts  up,  is  labelled  "desti'uctive" ;  while  one 
that  points  out  that  the  same  play  would  be  a 
much  better  play  if  Hauptmann  or  De  Curel 
had  written  it  is  labelled  "constructive  and  in- 
forming." And  so  it  goes.  With  the  result 
that  dramatic  criticism  in  America  is  a  dead 
art  language.  Like  Mr.  William  Jennings 
Bryan,  it  has  been  criticized  to  death. 

The  American  mania  for  being  on  the  pop- 
ular side  has  wrapped  its  tentacles  around 
the  American  criticism  of  the  theatre.  The 
American  critic,  either  because  his  job  de- 
pends upon  it  or  because  he  appreciates  that 
kudos  in  this  country,  as  in  no  other,  is  a  gift 
of  the  mob,  sedulously  plays  safe.  A  sheep, 
he  seeks  the  comfortable  support  of  other 
sheep.  It  means  freedom  from  alaiTims,  a 
guaranteed  pay  envelope  at  the  end  of  the 
week,  dignity  in  the  eyes  of  the  community, 
an  eventual  election  to  the  National  Insti- 
[146] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
tute  of  Arts  and  Letters  and,  when  he  reaches 
three  score  years  and  ten  and  his  trousers  have 
become  thin  in  the  seat,  a  benefit  in  the  Cen- 
tury Theatre  with  a  bill  made  up  of  all 
the  eminent  soft-shoe  dancers  and  fat  trage- 
diennes upon  whom  he  has  lavished  praise. 
This,  in  America,  is  the  respected  critic.  If 
we  had  among  us  today  a  Shaw,  or  a  Walkley, 
or  a  Boissard,  or  a  Bahr,  or  a  Julius  Bab, 
he  would  be  regarded  as  not  quite  nice. 
Certainly  the  Drama  League  would  not  invite 
him  to  appear  before  it.  Certainly  he  would 
never  be  invited  to  sit  between  Prof.  Richard 
Burton  and  Prof.  William  Lyon  Phelps  at  the 
gala  banquet  to  Mr.  D.  W.  Griffith.  Cer- 
tainly, if  his  writings  got  into  the  paid  prints 
at  all,  there  would  be  a  discreet  editor's  note 
at  the  top  to  the  effect  that  "the  publication  of 
an  article  does  not  necessarily  imply  that  it 
represents  the  ideas  of  this  publication  or  of 
its  editors." 

Criticism  in  America  must  follow  the  bell- 
cow.     The  bell-cow  is  personal  cowardice,  ar- 
tistic cowardice,  neighbourhood  cowardice,  or 
[147] 


TJie  Critic  and  the  Drama 
the  even  dheaper  cowardice  of  the  daily  and — 
to  a  much  lesser  degree — periodical  press. 
Up  to  within  a  few  years  ago  it  was  out  of 
the  question  for  a  dramatic  critic  to  write 
honestly  of  the  productions  of  David  Belasco 
and  still  keep  his  job.  One  of  the  leading 
N'ew  York  evening  newspapers  peremptorily 
discharged  its  reviewer  for  daring  to  do  so; 
another  New  York  newspaper  sternly  in- 
structed its  reviewer  not  to  make  the  same 
mistake  twice  under  the  penalty  of  being  cash- 
iered; a  leading  periodical  packed  off  its  re- 
viewer for  the  offence.  One  of  the  most  tal- 
ented critics  in  New  York  was  several  years 
ago  summarily  discharged  by  the  newspaper 
that  employed  him  because  he  wrote  an  honest 
criticism  of  a  very  bad  play  by  an  obscure 
playwright  named  Jules  Eckert  Goodman. 
Another  conscientious  critic,  daring  mob  opin- 
ion at  about  the  same  time — he  wrote,  as  I 
treca'll,  something  to  the  effect  that  the  late 
Charles  Frohman's  productions  were  often 
very  shoddy  things — was  charily  transferred 
[148] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
the  next  day  to  another  post  on  the  news- 
paper's staff.  I  myself,  ploughing  my  famil- 
iar modest  critical  course,  have,  indeed,  been 
made  not  personally  unaware  of  the  native 
editorial  horror  of  critical  opinions  which  are 
not  shared  by  the  Night  School  curricula,  the 
imnates  of  the  Actors'  Home,  the  Independ- 
ent Order  of  B'nai  B'rith,  the  United  Com- 
mercial Travellers  of  America,  and  the  Moose. 
Some  years  ago,  a  criticism  of  Hall  Caine  and 
of  his  play  "Margaret  Schiller,"  which  ven- 
tured the  opinion  that  the  M.  Caine  was  per- 
haps not  one  of  the  greatest  of  modern  gen- 
iuses, so  frightened  the  editors  of  the  Phila- 
delphia North  American  and  the  Cleveland 
Leader  that  I  doubt  they  have  yet  recovered 
from  the  fear  of  the  consequences  of  printing 
the  review. 

The  ruling  ethic  of  the  American  press  so 
far  as  the  theatre  is  concerned  is  one  of  unc- 
tuous lassez  faire.  "If  you  can't  praise, 
don't  dispraise,"  is  the  editorial  injunction  to 
the  reviewer.  The  theatre  in  America  is  a 
[149] 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
great  business — greater  even  than  the  depart- 
ment store — and  a  great  business  should  be 
treated  with  proper  respect.  What  if  the 
reviewer  does  not  admire  "The  Key  to 
Heaven"?  It  played  to  more  than  twelve 
thousand  dollars  last  week;  it  must  be  good. 
The  theatre  must  be  helped,  and  the  way  to 
help  it  is  uninterruptedly  to  speak  well  of  it. 
Fine  drama?  Art?  A  newspaper  has  no 
concern  with  fine  drama  and  art;  the  public  is 
not  interested  in  such  things.  A  newspaper's 
concern  is  primarily  with  news.  But  is  not 
dramatic  swindling,  the  selling  of  spurious 
wares  at  high  prices,  news?  Is  not  an  at- 
tempt to  corrupt  the  future  of  the  theatre  as 
an  honourable  institution  and  an  honourable 
business  also  news,  news  not  so  very  much  less 
interesting,  perhaps,  than  the  three  column  ac- 
count of  an  ex-Follies  girl's  adulteries?  The 
reviewer,  for  his  impertinence,  is  assigned 
henceforth  to  cover  the  Jefferson  Market 
police  court. 

The  key-note  of  the  American  journalistic 
[150] 


Dramatic  Criticism  in  America 
attitude   toward    the    theatre    is    a    stagnant 
optimism.     Dramatic  art  and  the  red-haired 
copy    boy    are   the    two    stock   jokes    of   the 
American  newspaper  office.     Here  and  there 
one    encounters    a    reviewer    who,    through 
either  the  forcefuhiess  or  the  amiability  of  his 
personality,  is  successful  for  a  short  time  in 
evading  the  editorial  shackles — there  are  a  few 
su^h  still  extant  as  I  write.     But  soon  or  late 
the  rattle  of  the  chains  is  heard  and  the  re- 
viewer that  was  is  no  more.     He  is  an  Ameri- 
can,   and   must    suffer   the   penalty   that    an 
American  who  aspires  to  cultured  viewpoint 
and  defiant  love  of  beauty  must  ever  suffer. 
For — so  George  Santayana,  late  professor  of 
philosophy  in  Harvard  University,  in  "Char- 
acter and   Opinion  in  the   United   States" — 
"the  luckless  American  who  is  drawn  to  poetic 
subtlety,    pious    retreats,    or    gay    passions, 
nevertheless  has  the  categorical  excellence  of 
work,  growth,  enterprise,  reform,  and  pros- 
perity dinned  into  his  ears:  every  door  is  open 
in  this  direction  and  shut  in  the  other;  so  that 

151 


The  Critic  and  the  Drama 
he  either  folds  up  his  heart  and  withers  in  a 
corner — in  remote  places  you  sometimes  find 
such  a  solitary  gaunt  idealist — or  else  he  flies 
to  Oxford  or  Florence  or  Montmartre  to  save 
his  soul — or  perhaps  not  to  save  it." 

THE  END 


152 


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